The light fades
by ShadowGuard23
Summary: Forged in war, the Shadow Guard protect the life of the galaxy with extreme methods; the purge of any deemed a threat by the high council of Terra. When a cloaked spy station over a forsaken planet sends a distress signal, the Council is left with little choice but to send the 23rd Shadow Guard to investigate the possible threat. Their destination; the planet Earth
1. Prologue

_This is Outcast 07-01-03.  
__  
__We are under attack. Our long range communications are down and we are no longer capable of sending warp band transmissions. With the Great Father's blessing, these words will reach the council before it is too late to stop the outbreak.  
__But, if this message reaches council space, be advised I will most likely be dead by the time this is heard again.  
__This is my last message.  
__We all thought it was just another parasite, a disease, that spread rapidly across the globe, just three days ago. Today, this whole planet went mad.  
__We intercepted reports of madness; people killing each other, consuming one another in irrational hatred and hunger. And before the data could be compiled, the damn space station; the ISS, spiraled out of control and has now rendered this outpost without system wide communications.  
__It's crew was also gone. Mad and infected.  
__I'm the last one left now. Dominus, Sanguinius, they're all gone. And now they're calling for my blood.  
__The door will not last much longer. To whomever receives this transmission, deliver it to the council with all haste. Earth has fallen within a few days to the parasite the humans are calling Cordyceps. If it escapes, entire systems could fall. Please; only the Council, and the Shadow Guard can deliver us from this threat now._

_This is ensign Ordias of Outcast station 07-01-03 signing off._

_Full transmission intercepted by the _Lone Protector_, twenty two years after it's original broadcast._


	2. The lost signal

_I abandon my hopes of the coming dawn, I forget my fears of the eternal night.  
__I accept death as my fate.  
__I pledge myself to the Shadows and War; I am the Will of the Council, and it's instrument.  
__The Vows of the Shadow Guard_

His footsteps clicked softly against the marble floor, as he walked the halls of the Council chambers. Pausing only to extend his thumb into a biometric verification checkpoint, he continued onward, marveling at the rich beauty of Terra.

It's vast expanses filled with both life, civilization and nature, it wasn't the first time councillor Bacarus had come up here, to the highest peak on Terra, to gaze in awe at the wonders of his home planet.

Below him, amongst the many structures of Hive Primaris, millions continued about their lives, whilst out in the wilderness, beyond the hive's walls, the song trees whispered their tunes into the wind.

But today, he was not up here for sightseeing the landmarks of the Garden world; he was here on Council business, and disturbing business at that.

Pushing the two ornate doors aside, Bacarus entered the Dome; the heart of communications within Council space. A massive, hollow structure, dozens of council beings scrambled about, extracting data from fleets, bringing reports of good and ill news.

'Avarkus,' he greeted one of the beings, who turned about, his long cloak still embracing his body. The two had known one another for a long time, but today, there was little to discuss on private matters.

'Bacarus,' his friend replied, moving into a polite bow before he continued, 'the Great Father guide you.'

'And you too.' The council member replied, as he repaid the courtesy with his own, but he moved on, neglecting further formalities, 'Has the message been deciphered yet?'

'Unfortunately, no.' the reply came, 'It has been of much interest to us, but the full message may never be uncovered, thanks to the xenos.'

'Damn them,' Bacarus spat, remembering the horrors he'd seen when he'd been sent to represent the council on the field, and he'd seen what was usually censored from the council's eyes; the blood and fury of a battle. 'May the _Lone Protector_ and her crew meet the Great Father with grace.'

'Indeed, it is a shame that they encountered a xeno fleet just prior to intercepting the message. I'm afraid they did not succeed in fully broadcasting their findings. What they found, we may never know.'

'Show me what their sacrifice was worth,' Bacarus instructed. His friend responded by waving over an ensign, who leapt to a seat, pulling the incomplete audio files received by the Dome just a day before; the last message of the _Lone Protector._

_Intercepted vital transmission...under attack...cannot hold...attempting to send message now._

_Outcast 07-01-03...under attack...no longer capable...last message...whole system...madness...entire systems could fall. Please; only the Council, and the Shadow Guard can deliver us... ensign Ordias...signing off._

'That's all?' Bacarus asked, frustrated with the lack of specifics in the data, though he was able to prevent any emotion reaching his words, in honor of those who died to deliver the transmission.

Avarkus nodded. 'Anything else was lost with the _Lone Protector_ when she was destroyed.'

'Damnit, did the xenos escape?'

'It's a significant incursion, my lord,' the Master of Voices responded, 'four fleet elements have been retasked with their destruction.'

'But who does that leave to take care of this? Planet 07-01-03, I seem to recall, is Earth; homeworld of humanity.'

'A correctly recalled fact,' Avarkus noted, though it was a well known world, after the events that took place three millennia ago.

'I think I'd recall any homeworld of a race that tried to build an intergalactic empire that stood over the ashes of any who were in their path,' Bacarus responded humorlessly.

'Indeed.' Avarkus eyed the council member with some wariness now, as now his options were severely limited to one that would already be asking for trouble.

'What forces are available to investigate the situation, Master of Voices?'

Here it came.

'With most of our forces engaging xenos in the Sigma and Theta systems, we're only left with forces dedicated to defending Terra.'

Bacarus glared at Avarkus, sensing deceit.

'That, with all respect, my friend, is rat shit. I saw a Shadow Guard regiment dock back in three days ago. Their ships are still docked; they are a valid option, are they not?'

'They would be if they weren't the 23rd, my lord.'

As quickly as it arose, Bacarus' anger subsided, as he realized why his friend had omitted the 23rd regiment from his options.

The remnants of a species nearly exterminated by mankind, during their prior days of conquest and destruction, they harboured a long feud against their mortal enemies, one which had recently been reignited in two encounters in the recent years, one of which only just two years past.

And one had ended with a dead Guard Battlemaster, and the other had damned their race to a slow extinction.

Still though, there wasn't any other choice. While Bacarus would have understood the 23rd's hatred, after spending much time with the late Battlemaster Corinthus, the Council, it's members more concerned with their own damn safety, would never sanction one of the many dedicated defense regiments of Terra to be reassigned away from Council space for protracted periods of time.

That effectively summed up to never.

'I'll present the options to the Council, Avarkus.' the council member said as he turned to leave.

'In the meantime, find Battlemaster Aurelius. I know he isn't going to appreciate it, but right now, with the council paranoid, I'm sure the two of us can already guess the decision.'

As the two friends parted, neither saw a cloaked figure, wrapped in darkness, slip away into shadow.

* * *

'If you're looking for the Battlemaster, he's not here.' The Guardsman stood a foot over Avarkus with ease, and he was fully armored, as all Guardsmen were at all times. If he weren't the Master of Voices, he knew that the trooper in front of him would gladly kick him out of sight of the _Armageddon _without a second thought. Still though, it would be better for Aurelius to find his next distasteful assignment sooner rather than later. He tried again.

'Council member Bacarus wishes me to pass a message to Battlemaster Aurelius, Guardsman. You will therefore let me aboard this ship to convey his message...'

'Why don't you give the message to me, citizen, and I'll give it to the Battlemaster?'

Avarkus ignored the insult. It was common place in the Guard that anyone who wasn't worthy of donning the colors of the Guard was a person to be protected when hell came for them.

Ordinarily, he might try to express his authority over the Guardsman, but this one, he recognised from the crushed skull insignia on the Guardsman's chest, was Korventhor; Master of Ordnance of the 23rd, and once it's Master of Purge. And no one, he knew, could reign this Guardsman back with the exception of Aurelius.

And he was nowhere to be seen.

'If you really must know, the Battlemaster is in the memorium right now. Message please.'

That was enough for Avarkus. If a Battlemaster was honoring his fallen, the first person to disturb him would most likely end up amongst the names that filled the memorium's walls.

'It is unconfirmed as of now, but it is likely that the 23rd will be reassigned to investigate a development on Earth.'

'What development?' the question was sour; bitter with hatred. The fact emotions could have come through the helmet, which usually kept dialogue amongst the Guard monotonous to say the least, spoke volumes.

'Again, it is unconfirmed, but contact with the Outcast facility over the planet has been lost.'

The Guardsman mulled over the information, before he realized the Master of Voices was still in front of him.

'Alright, I'll get him the message. Hop off now before I make you.'

Half walking, half pedaling away to ensure that the Guardsman didn't make good on his threat, Avarkus scuttled off into the dense streets of the Hive. When he was gone from sight, Korventhor opened up a comm link.

'Leandros, get your arse down here now. I'm going to find Aurelius. And it's not good news.'

He shut the link before his fellow Guardsman could argue with the prospect of guard duty before he plunged into the streets, the setting sun casting enough shadows for him to move unseen.

* * *

The figure sat at the far corner of the drinking house, cloak wrapped around himself, hood up. In his hand, he played about with a single metal chip the size of a matchbox, with a dimly lit blue screen that flashed four words again and again

Maximilium Corinthus, Battlemaster, Deceased.

He clenched his hand around the identification tag, before he relocked it back to his tactical belt. At the same time, the Guardsman took another deep sip of the rich draught on the table ahead of him.

'You know, I'm not entirely surprised I found you in a place like this again, friend.'

The figure didn't turn to the words at his back, simply opting to take another sip of the tempting draught.

'What are you doing down here, Korventhor? Last I saw, you were holding down the _Armageddon_.'

'Got bored. And Leandros is watching it now, so don't sweat. The Master of Voices was looking for you, Aurelius. Something bad is going down.'

'Has it got something to do with a certain species we can owe all our curses to?'

Korventhor was taken aback by Aurelius' knowledge on the matter, but it wasn't too surprising, considering the Battlemaster's joint position as a Stormcaller. Able to walk their minds through the other realm, they were the most dangerous of the 23rd, until the events on Exelon, just five years past, had seen all but one of their number fall to mankind.

'Outcast 07-01-03 fell off the grid. We're probably going to have a look, once the council decides.'

'They've already decided, in all probability,' the Battlemaster replied, finishing his draught, 'and I'm left wondering who, if any, of us are going to return.'

'You know, I told Avarkus that you were in the memorium. Guess I wasn't too far off the bat; whenever you're remembering the fallen, you're either in there, or in some hole like this.'

Aurelius just responded by pulling Corinthus' tags from his belt again, turning it over in his hands, despite it's size.

'I just wonder how much longer we have left,' he said, planting the tags on the table, 'until we're all gone. Excelon saw to that.'

Korventhor didn't have much of a reply to that. With the battle of Exelon, the 23rd had lost their only hope of enduring for an eternity. Death would come for them eventually, in the realm of combat. That was the curse of the Guard, he knew. While their augmentations made them immortal to aging, it also meant they'd keep fighting until their death, watching every brother fall to some horror spawned by the abyss of space, until it was their turn to fall. Fortunately though, another Guardsman's arrival averted the inevitable philosophical conversation with his Battlemaster. Like a demonic apparition, the Guardsman suddenly emerged from seemingly empty space, though Korventhor had known his friend too long to know he was the work of demons. Caius was just simply very good at remaining hidden when he wanted to.

'It's confirmed, Aurelius,' the new comer said as he sat down opposite Aurelius. 'We're to depart as soon as possible. The council is impatient given the circumstances.'

'Wait, he knows as well?' Korventhor asked, though he guessed he should have known. Aurelius never liked surprises, so Caius was always one step ahead, chasing down rumors, and confirming or denying their existence.

'How do you think I knew? I used the Storm? Believe me Korventhor, if I did, you might as well shoot me here and now for stupidity. The Storm is something we shouldn't trifle with, even if we have the means.'

'So what? You sent Caius?'

'Sorry if the decision offended you, Korventhor,' Caius put in, grinning under the helmet, 'but you need to be subtle when staying ahead of the council. You can't just barge into the Dome and the council's chamber, demanding answers. Listening in though, you can glean a lot.'

'And what did I do? You stuck me on guard duty?'

Aurelius just sighed at his friend's pigheaded nature.

'We need someone with muscles rather than brains to stop people coming aboard the _Armageddon_.'

Caius let out a bark of laughter at that, before the friends rose from the table, leaving a pair of silver coins behind, and an empty glass.

As they departed the bar, as Caius and Korventhor continued to argue with one another in good nature over the matter of who should do what in the future, Aurelius tucked Corinthus' tags back into the small pouch on his tac belt's right side, where it clicked softly as it fell against the dozens of his closest fallen brothers and sisters, before Aurelius closed the pouch once more.

* * *

Back aboard the _Armageddon_'s bridge, Aurelius seated himself back into the command chair of the ship. Around him, both Guardsmen and auxiliaries ran final system checks on for the ship. After the fleet action above Braxen IV, the ship was still in need of repairs, but with only non essential decks damaged now, they were clear to proceed into the depths of space once they were fully sealed off.

A council member had come earlier, officially giving him his mission details, which amounted to nothing, apart from the fact a situation had developed over Earth. But the 23rd had been on shore leave for a few days now; they'd be ready to kill something again.

The green acknowledgement light winked at him from the transparent holo screen, before Aurelius nodded to Caius.

'_Armageddon_ is clear for launch. Leaving council space now.'

'All weapons are reporting in green, Battlemaster.'

'Shields are green, Battlemaster.'

The reports giving him enough confidence that the _Armageddon_ could make it to Earth, Aurelius broadcasted the command to the rest of the Retributor fleet.

There were four ships in total, each a monster capable of destroying enemies many times their number. The _Apocalypse_, the _Guardian_, and the _Foresight Ubound_. Each primed and ready to take the fight to whatever hell had been spawned by humanity.

'Order is given; Ahead full.'Four lighting tears in space appeared before the ships, before they powered through, leaving council space and the safety of peace behind once more.

* * *

**Let me know what you guys think - first story to be posted on . Hope you enjoyed it; first chapter just to introduce the 23rd. Familiar faces will be met later in the story**


	3. Return to Hell

_To the Great Father, and every other blasted God out there, let me never see this hellhole again.  
__Aurelius; Stormcaller and now Battlemaster, on leaving Earth._

'Exiting warp in 3...2...1. Stand by.'

The mechanized AI of the _Armageddon_ intoned the warning to hang on, before the ship was violently torn from warp space, exiting back into the empty vacuum of real space. About the vessel, the rest of the Retributor fleet emerged, unscathed from their short travel. They'd left warp approximately a day away from Earth's system at sub light speeds, to prevent detection by human forces, and were currently positioned a hundred thousand kilometers outside of it's sister planet; Mars', atmosphere.

'Fleet reports green, Battlemaster,' called in an ensign on the lower level of the bridge.

'Get me the _Foresight_, ensign', Aurelius commanded, before the holographic display in front of his seat lit up, giving him a direct link to the Retributor fleet's dedicated infiltration vessel. Fast and streamlined, it was more than capable of bypassing the most advanced detection systems in the galaxy, though it struggled in heavy combat. That task was reserved for the _Armageddon_ alone.

'I want _Foresight Unbound_ ahead of the fleet, Maximus,' Aurelius said. The Guardsman on the other end of the link simply nodded before he shut the comms. Soon afterwards, the smallest ship of the fleet pulsed ahead, the only hint of it remaining being the dim glow of it's powerful engines, as the vessel's commander engaged it's stealth drives.

'Give the order ensign,' the Battlemaster ordered to another Guardsman, 'Ahead quarter speed. Same goes for the rest of the fleet save _Foresight_. Ghost us in.'

'Aye, Battlemaster. Estimated time to Earth at present speed - forty-eight hours.'

With a single nod, Aurelius turned about and departed from the command room, with too much time to kill before the battle could begin once more.

* * *

_Blood rain. Hellscape. Lementus III._

_Gripping the blade in one hand, the dying human in the other, Aurelius squeezed the life from the man, before he stabbed him through the gut, ending the invader's life. All about him, the vicious melee continued, his people dying as they fought back the foe._

_Ammunition exhausted, Talon broken, the only weapon that remained being his blade, he threw himself at the horde of flesh once more, hacking and slashing at any in his reach._

_His brothers were in no danger - those ahead of him already lay trampled into the bloody snow and ice._

_A figure crashed down on him, and they rolled about in the snow, grappling viciously for the last weapon in Aurelius' hands._

_He twisted the blade from his opponent's grip, and planted it solely in the man's chest, only for the dead human to be shoved onto him, pinning him under the dead weight._

_They had him surrounded; a dozen at least of those he hated most._

_Then, the leader - the one grasping a long bloodied standard, stood over him in triumph, before he brought the sharpened point down on Aurelius' leg again and again, savagely hacking away the limb._

_He roared out at his foes, never showing weakness, only hatred, for his enemy, until both his legs were gone, and the man planted the sharpened stake in his soft throat._

* * *

Clawing his way out of the nightmarish memory, the Battlemaster jolted upright in his quarters. He'd dozed off several hours past, in a vain attempt to rest and prepare mentally for the oncoming battle. Instead he remembered the hellish battle of his homeworld, and the loss of his brothers and legs.

Sending a neural impulse through the suit of armor, the lower armored joints unlocked themselves, folding over one another until a simple casing with an open side remained around his new legs.

The augmentic replacements were fine enough; metallic, reliable replicas linked to his half organic spinal cord. They still felt like his old ones.

They just were not.

Subconsciously rubbing at the old wound on his neck, Aurelius recalled, in the old pain, what Corinthus had told him as they'd departed.

_Never forget. Never forgive._

'Too true, Battlemaster,' he whispered to his late friend once more, before he locked himself in the armored carapace, and walked back out of darkness and into the ship's lighted corridors.

* * *

'Signal is live, Battlemaster.'

Once more, Maximus lit up his command screen, in full combat gear. Evidently, the _Foresight _had made contact with Earth. His next words dispelled that notion though.

'Battlemaster,' he opened emotionlessly, 'we have a dead world here. Scans are not detecting any life planetside, if they're actually getting through this damn spore layer.'

'Spores?' Aurelius inquiry was mixed with confusion and dread. If xenos were active here, the fleet was in no shape to combat them after the combat over Braxen IV. Their best odds would be to pull back and regroup with council forces before returning for a purge. The only good news would have been the race that once destroyed his was wiped from the face of the Galaxy, rather than crippled and their pasts retold to them like what the Council had done three millennia ago. Again though, Maximus' answer surprised him.

'Spores of an unknown origin, Battlemaster,' he elaborated, 'and they're scrambling most of our attempts to get any strong readings of the planet. And it's a thin layer at that. No possible way xenos could cause this interference at this concentration.'

'I see,' Aurelius replied, as he continued to mull over the unexpected turn of events. 'What of the Outcast?'

'A ruin in the center of a debris field,' came the reply. A holographic image of the station lit up the display; detailing the compromised Outcast, and what appeared to be a human vessel's debris surrounding it.

'For the damage it's taken,' Maximus added, 'internal scans indicate that the majority of the station is actually unscathed, and still pressurized, if we're reading this right.'

'I have an advance team already inside; twenty auxiliaries and Raven Carnax aboard Omen twelve.' As auxiliaries were, put simply, nothing more then brainwashed and genetically re-engineered enemies of the council, they lacked independence on many levels, and thus were usually placed under the command of Guardsmen. More than a few of the auxiliaries aboard the Retributor fleet's ships were once called human, and served as a constant reminder of their race's sins. 'We're still waiting on their return signal. Station is also filled with spores for some reason.'

He let the sentence hang before he rechecked the monitors on his side of the comms channel.

'Signal is expected within the hour,' he reported, 'Before we lost contact with them, the auxiliaries reported the station's dark completely; powered down. They'll need to get the station up and running again before they can make contact again.'

'How long have they been aboard the station?' enquired Aurelius.

'Seven hours now.'

Aurelius rechecked the math in his head. Within the first hour, they would have located the generator room. Refitting and realigning the reactor would take time; about seven hours, whilst others repaired the station's comms. Maximus' calculations made sense.

'Anyone on the ground?'

'Vanguard squad Aquila,' the Guardman responded immediately this time. There were no auxiliaries on vanguard teams. 'Five Guardsmen strong, with Omen eleven attached. They're working on recon and trying to locate any life.'

Aurelius sat back once more. The preliminary stages of this distasteful assignment had been executed flawlessly, and hopefully, they'd uncover answers soon and be back underway to the frontlines, where the fight really mattered instead of investigating a backwater he hated with every fibre in his body.

Just then, an alarm sounded.

'Omen twelve just lit up it's distress beacon!' An ensign shouted on the other ship.

'Get me Carnax now,' Maximus hissed, 'and alert Aquila. They may need to get back in the sky...'

'Keep Aquila grounded,' Aurelius instructed, prompting the Shipmaster of the _Foresight_ to turn about once more. 'I'll take Seventeen and check out the situation on the Outcast.'

He could tell from the slight twitch of the other Guardsman's trigger finger that he was about to object when reason stopped him. Spend millenia together wearing the encasing armor, and feelings could still be conveyed with ease past the cold black plating. Besides, Maximus only had two Omens at his disposal, as did every other ship in the fleet, apart from the _Apocalypse_, which carried at least a dozen of the armored assault craft at any one time as the fleet's designated carrier.

'We'll get Carnax out, Shipmaster,' he whispered, before he shut the link. Stepping nimbly out of the command chair, he quickly removed the command signet ring needed to command the ship's systems from his right index finger. On the way out, he flipped it into Caius' hands. The Master of Shadows simply nodded his head once in acknowledgement to the command. It hadn't been the first time Aurelius handed over control of his ship to the Hunter, particularly when he led boarding parties into the fray. After all, in the hearts and arteries of ships, Caius' long barreled rifle was often more of a hinderance than advantage.

At the helm of his own vessel though, he was more than capable of delivering judgement on the foe.

* * *

'Will she fly?'

'You're asking if Seventeen can get out of the hangar, yes.' replied the carefree Raven, 'if you're asking if she's ready to kick ass, then no. You told me I'd have at least another few hours to get my girl combat ready again.'

Aurelius eyed the Omen with some skepticism at Decius' complaint. The craft was far from small, being at least four meters in height, twenty meters in length, and five meters in width; then if one counted the four engine extensions that protruded from the corners of the craft that served as the ship's propulsion systems, capable of rotating to allow vertical takeoffs, high speed dogfights, and the ability to hover over the battlefield, raining hell down on the enemy.

Perhaps the greatest feature of the Omen was one that was never seen; literally. The stealth drive aboard the nimble craft allowed near perfect invisibility, although the deep blue hue of the engines could never truly be concealed, nor could their weapon systems when engaged. It was to that end that the entire craft was painted matt black; able to blend into the darkness without the need to initiate the light bending technology, enabling the glow of the engines to be concealed from hostile eyes when the craft was bearing straight down on them.

While Decius was right in that he'd yet to load any real weapons aboard the ship, apart from five energy cells for the plasma burst cannon at the prowl of the ship, all Aurelius needed was a means to get aboard the Outcast, uncover what had happened to Carnax and his team, before they extracted to deal with the situation on the ground. Besides, there wasn't any real choice, given the fact Omen Eighteen; the other Omen attached to the _Armageddon_, had met it's end during the battle over Braxen.

'Times change, Decius,' Aurelius told him. 'Besides, look on the bright side; humanity lost their phase weaponry with our victory, and we left them with iron. Shouldn't dent you too much.'

'If they're still there,' hissed the Raven, though the curse was directed at those he hated. Ravens were more than often sent on risky runs during the Excelon campaign, guiding their cloaked Omens into the hearts of the enemy before dropping their deadly cargo on the humans before retreating from humanity's extensive aerial armada. Decius had lost more than one brother to those howling fighters.

'We'll find out what's going on brother,' Aurelius told him carefully, 'And if they're behind it, then they'll die again. We'll see to that.'

'Bloody right we will.'

Both Raven and Battlemaster looked up to see Korventhor striding down to meet them, with Blademaster Leandros at his side, and for once since arriving in this bastardized system, Aurelius grinned. At their backs, they had a team assembled, but it didn't really matter. If there was a threat, he could probably deal with it with just the two of them. Amongst the hardened veterans of the 23rd, they had seen the battle for their homeworld, just as the Battlemaster had, three thousand years ago. And they were without a doubt, rivaled only by Caius and himself, the deadliest of that the Guard had to offer.

'Time to finish repaying the debt of blood,' Leandros breathed, as he ran one of the countless blades on his person along his outstretched arm, before he rammed it back into it's sheath. 'For Serena.'

'For all the Fallen,' Aurelius corrected him, although he couldn't reject the thought. The last of the females of their species, and the Master of the Storm at that, she had met her end during the Excelon campaign, on the Sigma Ridgeline. It was with her, that the 23rd had died slowly from that day onwards.

Their only path now was one that ended in death.

* * *

'Carnax, if you read, respond.'

Once again in vain, Decius finally halted his attempts to raise his fellow Raven, and turned his main attention back to guiding the Omen through the hazardous debris field. Pieces spun in place, the slightest backlash from the Omen's engines sending them reeling away from the scrap collection into the depths of space, and the Raven paused once more to thank the slim design of the craft he was piloting, less a larger obstruction scratch his latest patchwork attempts after Braxen IV.

Thankfully, most of it composed of a structure that appeared human in origin.

'There she is,' he called, sighting the ominous black structure at the center of the field. Designed to blend into the empty backdrop of outer space, both visually and digitally, thanks to it's many scrambling devices, Decius had had to guide the cloaked ship along the outer edge of the field, facing the Earth, until it's silhouette had finally given itself away against the blue and green terraformed landscape. 'Guiding us in.'

Behind him, in the troop bay of the transport, Aurelius and his insertion group readied. He had eleven other Guardsmen with him; including the Master of Ordnance and the Blademaster. Two polar opposites; one with an unhealthy obsession for heavy firepower and a distaste for subtlety, and the other with a solemn vow to never lay his hands on a firearm, unless it was to disarm an unskilled opponent. And yet the three of them, along with Caius, were probably the most tightly knit group amongst the 23rd; deadly as individuals, and deadlier when placed together.

How they'd actually gotten to like each other though, being so different, Aurelius didn't actually have an answer.

'Here we go, Guardsmen. Give 'em hell.'

The blast doors opened without much warning, before Aurelius led the way through, barreling down the troop deck, into the darkness beyond it.

'Cut illumination,' Aurelius ordered, shortly before they were plunged into the pitch dark. The pressure locks sealed behind them, locking the Guardsmen inside the Outcast station, as Decius began his run about the station. 'Stealthed advance. Noise discipline from here on out.'

Green acknowledgement lights blinked at him from his helmet's display, and he led the way, guiding them through the dark.

Not a single contact greeted them.

'I've got a really bad feeling about this,' Leandros whispered.

They moved on in utter silence, in a tight knit formation that had at least two troopers covering the front, sides, and rear at all times, and at least one other that had eyes above and below, when they moved along the catwalks of the station's hollowed segments.

Nothing greeted them, except for a thick uneven mist that seemed to be composed of countless white spores. They glided about in the air; around the Guard, and seemingly engulfed them until visibility was at an all time low, combined with the pitch dark.

Still nothing greeted them.

Sending Korventhor and Leandros to manually drag open the next bulkhead, Aurelius turned about to survey his surroundings, and check for anything at their backs.

Apart from the spores though, there was nothing, unless they were concealed within the hellish cloud.

'Great Father,' someone muttered in surprise behind the Battlemaster, prompting Aurelius to turn about once more.

What he saw was unlike anything he'd seen before.

The walls of the craft were mutilated with dark shapes and growths; unnaturally so, compared to the pristine silhouettes they'd seen earlier. Unthinkingly, with curiosity proving stronger than the need to remain undetected, he hit the illumination packs on his shoulder.

The hallway lip up to reveal a living hell.

Yellowish, twisted, nearly alien plant life engulfed the corridors. Red tipped growths extended from the carpets of hellish fungus, blossoming open like some corrupt piece of natural art, secreting clouds of white spores into the air. Not for the first time, Aurelius was glad he was clad in air tight armor, and felt similar feelings echo off members of his team. One could only guess what nightmare theses held. After human chemical attacks during the Excelon campaign, not to mention the extermination of his race across Lementus III, and the corrosive airborne toxins secreted by the xenos on Braxen IV, the Guard had grown wary of airborne threats, and had grown to trust their survival in their equipment. Those thoughts of gratitude for their armor were quickly forgotten though, as Leandros suddenly picked out a shape in the fungus that chilled blood.

Arm outstretched as if held suspended in imprisonment at it's death, a figure in a white bulky suite lay, back to the wall that had seemingly consumed him. But whilst the majority of the suit was uncathed, apart from a gaping wound in the chest of the human, the visor was cracked open and bloodied, and inside, a human lay; skeletal, but flesh still held in suspension, as if mummified by the fungus about him, his eyes gone; dried blood caking the empty sockets that the missing entities should have filled.

'What the hell is this?' the Battlemaster breathed, though no answer greeted him. Nothing he'd encountered across three millennia of combat compared to the sight before him, though it wasn't fear that stopped him. The hellfire wound at the man's chest told him they could be killed, and he was more than ready to have his vengeance on his old enemies, even if they were no longer themselves. It was rather uncertainty at the capabilities of this new threat.

In the end, the only real choice available was to push on, locate Carnax if he had survived, and pull the data from the station, uncovering what had transpired on the cursed world. But as they advanced along the twisted corridors, Aurelius could tell the confidence in the Guardsmen at his side was gone.

* * *

With power still apparently robbed from the station, the only means to enter the hangar through sealed doors was high explosives.

After remaining silent for so long though; the detonation was deafening, and Aurelius couldn't help but imagine that they'd just alerted the entire station to their presence.

They moved in a staggered formation; one Guardsman at intervals of two meters in three lines of four, hellfire rifles raised to strike down any threat that presented itself. Though each hellfire round was about a fist's length, and half it's height, the large ammunition pieces more than made up what they lacked in numbers through sheer firepower. With a basic AI at the heart of every round, hellfire bolts always detonated to create the most mayhem possible; even killing monsters with single well placed hits, as the rounds detonated within the beasts.

Still nothing met them.

Off to the side of the hangar though, lay a single Omen; the number twelve still painted clearly on it's side.

Sending four Guardsmen to cover the main exit, and another two to the doorway they'd just exited, Aurelius led the way to the badly damaged craft. Several sparks flew from open panels in it's side, and blood stained the ground about it, though no bodies lay in open sight.

That was until the Battlemaster ducked into the dimly lit interior of the Omen.

The humming distress beacon still locked in his right hand, the mutilated corpse of the Raven Carnax lay strewn across the steel floor. Bloody wounds strafed his entire body, and chunks of flesh were actually missing from segments of his being, including the majority of his head, and his left arm.

'Bloody hell,' Korventhor breathed as he spotted the slaughter, 'What does that? Certainly no human...'

He trailed off as Aurelius gingerly pulled the Raven up for a closer inspection of his wounds.

'Is that a bite mark?'

The Battlemaster indicated toward a rough indentation on the Guardsman's shoulder; sick with decay and pussing with infection, it still encompassed two clear curved lines of teeth. Far from the jagged, randomized patterns of xenos. These were clear and regular. A human's.

'Something is very wrong here,' Aurelius decided.

'Great to point out the obvious,' put in Leandros, though there was no malice there; just another of the Blademaster's attempts to lighten the mood. Unfortunately though, the threat of the unknown defeated him.

* * *

They moved silently through the dark, watchful for any sign; any foe to appear. It was frustrating, to say the least for Aurelius, being accustomed to being the hunter, to be uncertain of an enemy.

'Movement.'

The curt hiss from up ahead halted the formation, and quickly, the line spread out into three man ranks; covering the wide catwalk. With the main bulkhead sealed, and Aurelius being unwilling to risk another explosive charge warning whatever was stalking them, the squad had taken the same route Carnax's auxiliaries had evidently taken, judging from the number of blast doors already pried open by brute force. That path had eventually veered them into engineering, where the spores were quickly thickening, to the point at which visibility was at an all time low. It also had the effect of distorting any movement sighted; making it hard to discern if it was just the movement of spores that deceived the eye, or an actual body plowing through the thick clouds.

Gesturing the lead rank forward, Aurelius cut his hand through the air, motioning for the teams to move at intervals; covering one another as they did so.

'False alarm?' he whispered hopefully, although, judging from Titus' uncertain shrug, the Guardsman had seen something in the mist. It was just a matter of when it would announce itself.

'Move up,' he ordered, and with rifles raised, he, Leandros and Livanus walked forward; beyond the first rank, further into the dark.

Something stirred in reaction to their motion, and in a heartbeat, Aurelius held his hand up, dropping the first rank to the ground, whilst the others aimed over them for the unseen threat.

Then, through the billowing clouds of spores, an auxiliary stumbled through, rifle still raised and on guard.

There was probably no other moment in three millennia of fighting that Aurelius had been more glad to see a human auxiliary. Granted, they were little better than undead soldiers, unnerving in company, and not much better than automatons in combat. But for now at least, he could calm down.

Just as he was about to signal the all clear though, the auxiliary screamed through a twisted voice box and sprinted for the Battlemaster, arms outstretched for Aurelius' neck, blood flying from it's mouth and eyes.


	4. Not alone

_Waiting for combat is the worst of war  
__Leandros, Blademaster, prior to the Battle of the Sigma Ridgeline, Excelon._

Aurelius had just enough time to realize the auxiliary was hostile before it crashed into him, sending both him and his assailant tumbled off the support railing into empty space. As they fell, the Battlemaster finally managed to grip the malfunctioning trooper's neck and choke the damn thing, but it kept fighting.

Aurelius felt bones crack under the pressure of his choke hold.

Still it fought.

Aurelius had enough time to ponder the reasons for the undying auxiliary for approximately two seconds more before he crashed into the structural supports of below the catwalks of the engineering room.

Scrambling up to meet his assailant, Aurelius hit the tactical lights mounted at the sides of his helmet, more or less to identify his opponent than to actually spot it, as the radical movements of the shadowy figure made it fairly easy to track.

What he saw caused him to nearly drop the hellfire pistol in his hand.

The auxiliary had once been human in structure, and was clad in standard tactical combat gear, but it still reminded him too much of the Exelon and Lementus.

But that was where the similarities with his old nemesis ended.

While it's face might have once bore some resemblance to that of a converted human's, it's eyes were gone, it's sockets empty and bloody, save for something that looked disturbingly like the fungal growths he'd seen bursting from the embedded corpses emerging from the darkened recesses of it's eyesight. Though auxiliaries had always reminded him of something that had been destroyed, dug up and then revived for the good of the council, this one looked too dead to be able to even walk. Yet it was doing so, right towards the Battlemaster.

The thing shambled at him again, emitting a series of groans and squarks as it lunged for the Battlemaster, as it flailed it's arms at him, trying to catch the Guardsman in a death grip.

Aurelius quickly backpedaled from the monster, but it continued to advance, following him no matter where he moved, despite it's apparently poor eyesight.

It came for him again, forcing the Battlemaster to evade it again. It was relatively easy to keep ahead of the beast - it's actions were slow and cumbersome, and easy to predict. He just had to stay out of range of the beast's arms; there was an unnatural strength behind it's movements, and the last thing he needed was to get locked in it's vice grip.

Just when the monster's back was exposed, Aurelius realized, with a sinking feeling, that he'd just backed himself into a corner.

As it came for him once more, Aurelius unsheathed his Talons. Half meter long, claw like weapons that were the staple of the Guard, the Battlemaster possessed three on each hand, retractable into the large gauntlets worn by the Guard. The blades were honed, as Aurelius had seen fit, and were now ready, to draw the blood of his present foe.

'Alright you bastard,' he whispered, 'let's finish this.'

The beast came lumbering for him again, only to stop meters from the Battlemaster, a solid blade protruding from it's neck.

Letting out a final groan, the corpse shuddered, before it fell to the ground, dead.

'Got tired of waiting for your sorry ass,' said Leandros, as he walked to greet his friend again, barely breaking his stride to retrieve his fallen blade. In the same action, he flicked the dark blood from the sharpened edges of the serrated weapon, leaving a broken pattern of blood on the ground, aside the growing circle that continued to radiated from the fallen creature.

* * *

Scaling back to the team with a number of drop lines deployed by the rest of the insertion group, Aurelius clambered back over the railing into friendly hands. He noted though, with a mixture of interest and concern, that a number of bodies similar to the one he'd just faced now littered the floor.

'They came out of the walls and the ceiling.' reported Korventhor, the Executioner cannon now held loosely in his hands, still purring for another target.

'Any injuries?' asked the Battlemaster. At that, Livianus, stepped forward, shamefaced under his helm.

'Sorry Battlemaster,' he said tentatively, holding out a bleeding arm. 'Bastard bit me. Nothing too bad though.'

Aurelius eyed the wound. It was at the inner elbow joint, where the hardened carapace gave way to far more fragile combat skin. Aurelius couldn't see much, but the wound bled and pussed, unnaturally so for a trooper with implantations.

'Alright,' he said, 'I want you back on the Omen.' The trooper began to argue, but Aurelius silenced him.  
'Your suit is no longer pressurized; if we get in too deep, the only option may be outside, and you won't survive that. Get back to the ship, Guardsman.'

'Yes sir,' the trooper replied, though his thoughts betrayed him to Aurelius.

_It's only a bite_, he thought as he stalked off back down the darkened corridors of the Outcast.

* * *

Though other life evidently scuttled throughout the ship, the squad made no further contacts, as they advanced on the bridge, though Aurelius spent the better part of the time cursing the hollow design of the Outcast, as every single step of the infected proceeded to ring loudly, sending echoes throughout the ship without giving the Guard any solid direction to search for their targets in, while setting their nerves on edge.

At the same time, he cursed the spores that hung about in the air, that clogged the his suit's systems, and sent most of the advanced circuitry within his armor haywire.

Over reliance on technology had become the bane of the 23rd. Now they were left with the sheer basics, and nothing else. Already, they'd taken the wrong path twice, winding up at the entrance of reactor core, which no longer hummed with life, or the deserted barracks that had once housed the garrison of the Outcast. And in every corridor, the eerie fungal growths decorated the walls, floor and roof, occasionally with a figure in a ruined white suit grafted into the environment. But three times now, Aurelius had also spotted a dark figure donning the armor of the Shadow Guard amongst the growths.

He'd wanted to move in, recover their tags, but the fungal growths rendered that task useless, their twisting tendrils having crushed those identities long ago.

Finally, they reached the command deck.

Two corpses tay by the entrance, hellfire wounds evident across their bodies, but at the center of the room, an empty shell of light carapace that had been cracked open by brute force, lay.

The trooper's head was missing, and the hellfire pistol it's hand had once gripped lay loosely at it's side, pointed to where the missing entity would have existed.

'Guess he wanted to end it quickly,' muttered Leandros, as Aurelius moved to the corpse's side, and picked up the only identification chip he'd found since boarding the station.

'Horatio Ordias, Ensign, Deceased.' He read aloud, before he placed the battered chip within the pouch at his side. Another name to avenge, once he found the killers. Meanwhile, Korventhor moved back to the door, working with another Guardsman, Titus, to seal the door shut, although, devoid of power, it was a hard task. At the same time, Aurelius and Leandros leapt to the computers to pull data, only to recall that the power generator of the Outcast no longer hummed with power.

'Any volunteers to head back down?'

After the sudden attack in the corridor, Aurelius hadn't exactly been expecting a gun ho answer, so he wasn't entirely disappointed when not one Guardsman activated their acknowledgement light on his helmet.

'Alright,' he decided, 'I'll go, along with Lucius and Castor. The rest of you, hold down the fort.'

He was not met with any objections there, although there was a second of hesitation before the two Guardsmen he'd named flashed their acknowledgment lights.

Aurelius didn't blame them. After all, they'd sent in twenty auxiliaires, and only encountered five so far. The others; he had no idea where they'd find them.

The reactor core, dark and with plenty of places to hide, seemed the ideal place to start.

* * *

They moved back down the same path they'd taken from the hangar, ever watchful for the other infected auxiliaries, but never encountering them, only hearing their shuffling movements.

Aurelius led the way, with Lucius at his side, and Castor covering the rear.

Still, nothing came.

Even when they reached the reactor controls, and Aurelius counted a half dozen decent ambush sites for them, nothing came across their path.

The tension was probably worse than the actual battle.

At least a new reactor was loaded in place he thought, as he spotted the green glow from the control console, indicating a ready state. Must have been the last thing they managed, before they turned, he decided.

After navigating their way to the reactor's controls, and discovering the last body of the five man garrison aboard the Outcast, Aurelius weighed the risks of reactivating the reactor without warning, before he finally threw caution into the winds.

With a flick of the switch, the reactor burst back to life, and the battle began.

* * *

Hands grabbed at his feet, before Aurelius unleashed a pair of hellfires, severing the two upper limbs of the auxiliary that had attempted to hide beneath the catwalks, allowing the infected soldier to fall to it's death. Fire crackled throughout the vessel, as both the reactor room and the command center fell under attack.

Aurelius trained the hellfire rifle on another auxiliary that charged at him and his squad, planting a hellfire round solidly in it's chest, already seeing in his mind's eye the explosion that would tear the beast in half.

An explosion that never came.

The round merely tore through the infected, passing through it's body completely, but the hellfire remained unexploded.

Two more cracks of hellfire fire cut into the auxiliary, but they were met with the same results, until Aurelius opted for Korventhor's methods; switching the rifle to full auto, he opened fire on the auxiliary until it was reduced to a pile of flesh and iron.

'If that's what it takes to put them down with munitions,' Put in Lucius, eyeing the mutilated corpse ahead of them, 'I might stick with my blades,'

'Come on,' Aurelius said, loading in another clip, 'the others are probably in trouble too. We need to get up there.'

'More contacts!' Called Castor, before he lit up the corridor in fire as well, as three more auxiliaries shambled towards the Guardsmen, followed by another eight.

'We don't have enough supplies to take them on. Break contact and fall back!' ordered Aurelius, before he pulled the Hunter from the fray. He stopped to put down a few seconds of fire, before he too ran for the command center, and the refuge it offered, with the hangar bay now blocked with the undead.

'Have you pulled all the data?' asked Aurelius as he picked himself up from the floor. Having just made a desperate sprint when the squad was jumped by the remaining two auxiliaries, they'd thrown themselves through the door before Korventhor had sealed it with the power that now pulsed through the facility.

'Anything I could recover, although we'll need Caius to decipher it,' Leandro replied.

'Then we're leaving.' Aurelius turned back to Korventhor, who still stood by the door.

'About that,' he put in, 'the door is not exactly an option for us right now.'

As if to reinforce the Guardsman's point, a body slammed against the door with renewed force as he said the words. Aurelius however, was undeterred.

'Then we go out the hard way.' He said, gesturing with a thumb toward the bridge's observation window, and the space beyond it.

Though it was their only real option, nobody was entirely eager with the plan, even as Korventhor placed the demo charges on the window, namely because Omen 17 was currently unreachable due to the spore layer. They'd need to get outside, before contact could be made.

'This is a really bad idea,' Leandros whispered. Despite the fact it was Aurelius' plan, he had to agree with the Blademaster.

'It is, but unless you see another way, we're going out there in ten seconds.'

As he counted down, the persistent voice rumbled again, 'Really wish I could.'


	5. Knowledge is power

_Lack of knowledge is probably the highest cause of death on the battlefield.  
__Sidonus, Guardsman, his last words before being killed by a sniper._

'Okay, Caius,' began Aurelius as he strode into the _Armageddon_'s laboratory, 'give me some good news.'

The Master of Shadows looked up from the Guardsman on the gurney, and eyed the approaching Battlemaster. At his entrance, Livianus had straightened up slightly, and threw him an informal salute, being incapable of the normal customary bow from a seating position. Aurelius just responded with a nod before turning back to Caius.

'Well,' Caius started, not quite sure how to present his findings, before he recalled the entire report he'd decoded from the salvaged Outcast, which now lay in ruin; with Aurelius being unwilling to send in more Guardsmen to hunt down the remaining rouge auxiliaries, the _Armageddon _had seen to it's destruction, shortly after Seventeen had extracted the team from the cold void. 'I have a report composed by the late crew of Outcast 07-01-03. Perhaps you'd like to start there?'

'Excellent,' Aurelius replied, although he knew he wasn't going to be smiling by the time he finished rifling through this. Caius passed him the thin metal frame that quickly projected the holographic data into it's interior, and Aurelius rifled through it in a quick scan before he turned back to Caius.

'Cordyceps?'

Caius only shrugged at that.

'The human name for the parasite that was behind the apparent infection of the auxiliaries,' he stated, bringing up his own holo tablet, and referring to the notes there. 'From what it says here, 'Infection is caused by inhalation of Cordyceps spores in high concentrations, such as in enclosed spaces and structures.''

'Are we clear?' asked Aurelius, recalling the fact that they'd spent the better part of the last hour moving through the dark halls of the Outcast, all the time overwhelmed with spores.

'Should be,' replied the Guardsman at his side, 'I've scanned the interior of several helmets from the troops that went on the insertion, including Livanus'. No trace of any spores, thanks to the filters in the helmets, although I can't say the same about the rest of our gear. Even in low concentrations, the spores seem to be causing all kinds of malfunctions in AI equipment. Probably why the hellfire rounds didn't detonate.'

'True...' agreed Aurelius, before he saw Livanus scratch idly at the bite wound on his arm. 'Alright there, Guardsman?'

The trooper just waved him off. 'I'll be more careful next time, sir.'

'If there is a next time,' Caius put in darkly, 'Antitoxins I've tried haven't killed the infection in the bite.'

'Tried the Purgance virus?'

Caius nodded his head wearily. 'A few minutes ago. We'll have to wait and see if it clears. Until then though, I don't recommend him being taken down on operations.'

'I'll be fine, worry wart.' interjected the stubborn Guardsman. 'Just don't finish the war before I get there.'

'This isn't a war,' Aurelius corrected him, before his mind flashed back to the feeling of being hunted in those corridors. A war was when oneself and the enemy fought each other, face to face, without mercy, until one fell and the other triumphed. These creatures though, killing seemed to be a form of their survival, and they would continue to do so until their death. 'It'll have to be a purge.'

The wounded Guardsman leant back against the hard gurney once more, grinning. 'Just like old times. Just don't finish up before I get there.'

* * *

Aurelius eyed the latest report from Aquila with some weariness. For the fourth time since making landfall, and approaching some kind of settlement, they'd found it devoid of any life. While in truth, they'd simply done a quick flyby, and dropped into several randomized buildings to check for occupants, in light of the discovery on the Outcast, each time they'd come up empty handed.

And while the first three had been small towns or hamlets, the last one had been a settlement about the size of a Hive back on Terra. An entire city; dead.

'Might be better this way,' Caius said, as he read the same report, 'At least this way, they aren't capable of making smart choices when we launch the purge. Seems like the parasite turns them, feral almost.'

'Yeah, but where's the fun in that?' Korventhor looked suitably disappointed with the current turn of events, and Aurelius eyed him with some curiosity. 'No vehicles, no explosions. It'll almost be unfair. Besides, the last thing I wanted after Braxen was another bloody hunt.'

Aurelius couldn't disagree there, as his mind flashed back to the darkened subterranean tunnels of their last battle, searching in the darkness for a foe they knew to be there, waiting for them to spring their trap.

Better the demon you know, he thought, before he stopped himself. A feral enemy; you could still predict. An intelligent one though, and one as innovative as humanity? Only the Great Father could predict their next move, and only because he sanctioned it.

'How long ago did this outbreak occur, Caius?' he wondered aloud, already preparing himself for a barrage of exessive data from the Hunter, as he ran through the maths he'd worked through before coming to a simple conclusion. The Guardsman's long pause though, took him by surprise, and he looked up, cocking his head to the side to prompt the Guardsman. Still, Caius hesitated for a while before he finally answered.

'According to the file reports,' he began carefully, 'twenty two years.'

'What?' Aurelius slammed the holo pad in his hand down on the table hard in disbelief, 'How by the Great Father did this happen twenty two years ago? _Lone Protector_ only intercepted the transmission a few days ago. It can't be...'

Rather than electing to answer personally, Caius tapped his own holo tablet once, before a perfect, complete audio recording of ensign Ordias' last message filled the room.

Aurelius sank back in his seat, and held his head in a single hand.

Before he could think on the failure any further though, an alarm blared to life, so suddenly that he nearly fell back from the command seat. Composing himself in an instant, he leapt up to his feet, hammering in the button that activated ship wide communications.

'This is Battlemaster Aurelius. Someone tell me what the hell is going on on my ship.'

'Medical bay!' someone screamed down a transmitter. 'Livanus...'

The Guardsman on the other end was then cut off, as something evidently barreled into him, and destroyed the comm set.

'Activate lockdown in the infirmary,' Aurelius ordered, before he unlocked the hellfire rifle from his back once more. Along the sides of the command center, ensigns armed themselves with short ranged weaponry, ready to respond to the threat, as Aurelius marched outside, Caius in tow, for the elevator, and the medical bay below.

* * *

The solid doors slid aside, to admit jets of fire suppressants flooding the corridor ahead. Aurelius led the way, followed by a hastily assembled team of a dozen Guardsmen, including Caius and Leandros. On the far side of the infirmary, Korventhor began his own sweep. At a wave of his hand, the blast doors behind him slid shut once more, sealing the Guardsmen, and the threat, inside the half dozen room area that made up the _Armageddon_'s medical bay.

Seeing Korventhor's group on the far side of the corridor that linked the rooms together, with three on each side, Aurelius motioned for him to break his team up, and to hit the rooms simultaneously. Quietly, without a sound heard amongst the blaring alarms and the hissing of gas jets attempting to douse a flame somewhere in the block, Aurelius closed his hand into a fist, and the Guardsmen opened the sealed doors.

The room Aurelius entered with his rifle at the ready was empty; still pristene clean, having yet to have seen blood since the 23rd's last battle.

Then, to his right, he heard shouts of surprise, and hellfire fire.

He leapt back outside, in time to see Caius and Castor slammed aside by a rapidly moving figure clad in black armor.

Save his helmet, and Aurelius found himself staring into Livanus' eyes; bloodshot, and mad.

Letting out a screech that wasn't his own, the once-Guardsman barreled down on the Battlemaster, all too similar to the infected auxiliaries aboard the Outcast, and Aurelius knew in that moment, that there was no saving his friend.

His hellfire rifle, already leveled on the Guardsman's head, cracked, and Livanus fell to the ground, his head gone.

Then, a split second after the hellfire had impacted with the infected Guardsman, the explosive warhead detonated, spraying the hallway with matted gore.

Although he'd seen death many times throughout his life as a Guardsman of the council, Aurelius had never been forced to take the life of a fellow brother that wasn't already dead, and he dropped to his knees, praying to the Great Father for forgiveness.

It was then that he realized Dominus; another of the troops that had been caught in Livanus' headlong bull rush, was staring down a wound on his hand in horror.

A bite.

Reason taking over initial shock, Aurelius told himself, convinced himself, that it had to be done; that Livanus had died the second the parasite had taken him. The thing he'd just killed was not his brother. Just something wearing his skin.

He rose cautiously, to meet the trembling Guardsman. Caius had told him that Livanus had never breathed in any spores. That left no margin of error for mistaking the origion of Livanus' infection.

And now it had been passed on to Dominus.

'Drop your firearm, Guardsman.' he ordered, but Dominus just stared at the wound. Aurelius moved closer, and grabbed him by the shoulders.

'Snap out of it, Dominus,' he tried again, 'We'll get this fixed; we'll find a cure. Just drop the bloody rifle.'

He was quite surprised at the force behind Dominus' shove, that sent him sprawling backwards, tripping over Livanus' headless corpse. He tried to rise, to berate the Guardsman for losing control, before the sight of the infected Guardsman stopped him.

His rifle now lay on the floor, but his helmet dangled clutched in one hand, and his was hellfire pistol was draw, in a death grip with his wounded hand. Slowly, he raised the firearm to his mouth.

'You can't help me,' he whispered, 'And I'm not turning on my brothers.'

'Dominus!' Aurelius pleaded, 'Don't...'

The single hellfire round echoed throughout the ship, ending only at its border with the empty space beyond it.

* * *

'I say we just burn the shit hole to the ground.' Leandros vented, gesturing at the blue planet below them as he did so. 'They caused this. I know it.'

'They're an intelligent species,' Caius argued back, his arms crossed over one another as he stood against his hot headed Battle brother, 'you know council protocol here. We can't just wipe them out, like xenos. One day, be it tomorrow or another few millennia into the future, the council sees them with us, like it or not.'

'They haven't seen them up close, have they?' the Blademaster hissed back, 'The blind bastards think that humans can be manipulated. News flash; they can't. Only way to end the threat permanently is death. Right now.'

Korventhor shook his head twice before he spoke up.

'I'm with Leandros on this one,' he began tentatively, 'We'd lose too many going down there to root them out. Burning this hell hole from up here is the safest option.'

'I'm begining to wonder if you two ever paid attention to any of the guidelines set by the council,' Caius muttered. At that, Leandros gave him a wolfish grin.

'I know I did. I just didn't pay attention to the bullshit.'

'You can't burn a terraformed world, Leandros!' The Master of Shadows finally lost his temper, spitting the words, 'Do you think there's one in every system, all ready prepared to receive settlers? Efforts to fully terraform a dead world take well over a millenia. You should know that by now...'

'Who gives a fig for protocol now?' Leandros returned, 'We have twenty auxiliares dead, and four of our brothers to boot. Worst comes to worst, we fake the report. They opened fire first.'

'Alright, alright, quite, the lot of you!'

Aurelius' shout silenced the three of them, although Korventhor had somewhat taken a backseat in the debate. The Battlemaster eyed each of them, seeing the reasoning behind each one. They'd follow his orders, he knew. They didn't have to like them.

'Now listen, I'm not sending the entirety of the 23rd groundside to get butchered in another open war.' His steely glare passed over each and every one of the Guardsmen ahead of him as he said the words. 'Nor will I sanction turning a terran planet into a pile of ash. Caius, this thing is a parasite isn't it? A living pathogen?'

The Master of Shadows only nodded in response.

'Then we go groundside with a small team, recover samples, and find a way to kill it. Implement it into the Purgance virus, and unleash it on the globe.'

The Guardsmen ahead of him were silent, as they mulled over the plan. He could tell plainly that it wasn't what Leandros had in mind, as the Blademaster took a subconscious pace back from the table. As the Purgance virus was a selective genetically engineered pathogen designed to consume other pathogens before it collapsed on itself, it lacked any kind of fallout on humanity the the Blademaster had in mind. Still though, there wasn't any other real solution, if they weren't going to receive hell from the Council when they returned.

Finally, Korventhor spoke up.

'Who's going groundside?'

'Vanguard detachment; thirty to fifty infantry, with five Omens and a Behemoth. And you lot,' he pointed deliberately at each of them before he continued, 'just volunteered yourselves. Rendezvous in the hangar in three hours. Until then, you are dismissed.'

The three simply threw him an informal salute each before sauntering off, to prepare to return to the planet they hated most.

* * *

'Exit protocols complete, we are clear.'

Decius' voice intoned throughout the hangar, as Omen seventeen was released from it's storing position underneath the floor of the open space. Lifted up by powerful servos beneath the transport pad, the Omen was unveiled to it's awaiting occupants.

'Alright, everyone in,' Aurelius ordered, before the assembled Guardsmen at his side marched forward, each carrying full combat packs laden with supplies over their black cloaks. With the effect of the spores on aircraft systems still undetermined, and if they had any longevity within the structures, Aurelius had decided to limit the movement of ships between the Retributor fleet in space, and those on the ground. Everyone going downside would be staying there until this was over, thus, between the six vessels that would enter the atmosphere, they were carrying enough supplies to last the detachment over a month.

While it may have been excessive, it always helped to be prepared, Aurelius told himself.

He was the last through, placing his own added kit on the rack at the center of the aircraft's troop bay, before he locked himself into the hardened impact steats that lined the Omen's interior.

'We're clear, Decius,' he spoke, activating a comm link with the Raven as he did so. 'You can bring us out.'

'Stand by...' the reply came, before the engines beyond the walls erupted into life. 'Stand back everyone.'

The warning was unnecessary, as the Omen's engines scorched the hardened plating beneath it in it's lift off, prior to Decius' final readjustments that sent the craft plunging out of the _Armageddon_, and into the void of space.

The craft drifted into the vacuum, before Decius realigned the engines once more, pulsing the Omen toward the planet below them, and the oncoming battle once more.

Not for the first time, Aurelius felt time pass too slowly in the bowels of the Omen. Once in the heart of battle, everything would be a blur, he knew, and the Guard relished in that.

But waiting for it? The worst of war.

Restraints unlocked from the initial launch sequence, Aurelius paced back and forth, whilst the rest of the Guardsmen readied their own weaponry for the hunt. He took in everything about him, and quickly ran back through the Guardsmen that had accompanied him on this bloody run.

There were Caius, Leandros and Korventhor, of course, and most of the other seven inside the bays had accompanied them into the Outcast itself, and returned.

Three of Caius' hunters sat crouched on the far side of the craft; the eyes and ears of the Guard, he'd be trusting them in keeping them out of surprises. Meanwhile, the other four Battle brothers; the frontline core of the Guard, locked additional weaponry to their sides, including a multitude of explosives, earning a satisfactory nod from Korventhor.

'Can never be too careful,' he put in.

Aurelius only nodded his agreement in that, before he moved back over to the restraining seat. All he could think about was what they were going to find down there, beyond the spore layer.

Perhaps it was the act that stopped him from being thrown from his feet, as most of the other Guardsmen were, as a sudden explosion rocked the ship.

'Decius, what the hell did you just do?' he demanded gruffly. They were already well inside the atmosphere; there was no way the Raven could have damaged the ship by entering something already past them. The only thing that could have caused an explosion like that was if Decius had just rammed them into a solid wall.

'_Spirit of Iron_ just took a hit!' he called frantically. Immediately, Aurelius dropped the stern act, and sprinted from his seat, into the cockpit. Decius was there, vering the craft off to the right, although Aurelius managed to catch a final glimpse of the Behemoth from the _Apocalypse's_ holds fall from the sky, a gaping, blazing hole in it's side.

It was then that Aurelius realized how close to the ground they were, and he was violently torn out of the cockpit by the sudden change in direction of gravity, as Decius drove the craft upwards, narrowly missing a second projectile that slammed once more into the largest ship of the convoy.

'Who the hell is firing at us?' He demanded, although he already had a good clue.

'Any other intelligent life on this planet you can think of?' Caius asked as he grabbed the Battlemaster by the wrist to drag him upright. Aurelius pulled himself up before he shook his head in grim realization.

'Decius, any target locks?'

'Negative on that, Battlemaster,' the Raven called back from the cockpit, 'Tracking is offline, and I can't read any life signatures out there. Bloody spores have most of the automated systems haywire!'

'_Spirit of Iron_'s going down!'

Aurelius managed to navigate his way to the rear surveillance port embedded in the Omen's main deployment hatch, where Leandros was currently bracing himself against. Outside, he could see the fifty foot transport belching flames from its wounds, before it made contact with the ground; tearing the sides of a wide valley gorge. Throwing out a hand to steady himself, Aurelius hit the comms once more.

'Decius, get this craft stable, and drop us down there. Tell the others to make the link up with Aquila and get to the base site. We'll recover as much as we can and then we'll pull out.'

'Protocol dictates...' the Raven said more, but Aurelius fired his response faster than the Raven could continue speaking.

'The more ships involved, the greater likelihood of us losing another. Get us down there.'

A few moments later, the Omen straightened out, and Decius' voice returned to his helmet's interior once more.

'Convoy is on course again. Prep for drop in thirty seconds.'

Whispering his acknowledgement back to the Raven, Aurelius relayed the drop orders to the rest of the team. By the time the elevator to earth had reached drop line distance they were ready to meet their enemy once more.


	6. Merciless

_Mercy is weakness.  
__Landorus Rex, Battlemaster, before leading the 10th Shadow Guard into battle on Lementus III._

Aurelius plummeted downward, the sturdy dropline being the only thing keeping him from actually impacting with the ground at his current high speed. Slowly but surely, he slowed his descent, until his feet landed once again in the green grass of Earth.

A single hand moving to his back to detach the line, Aurelius held the hellfire rifle in other hand at the ready, scanning for a target. Nothing except the grass in the wind moved.

'Seeing movement at the crash site,' called in Decius' voice, 'And they are not Guardsmen.'

'Copy that, Raven.' Aurelius replied, as the line came loose. 'On route now.'

The Guard moved up the ridge they'd dropped behind in a loose, staggered formation; at least five meters between each trooper in the squad.

Nothing greeted them at the ridge's summit, with the exception of a few small critters about the size of the Battlemaster's fist that scuttled away in fear of their approach, their tails between their legs.

'Pretty sure they couldn't fire a rocket,' Leandros joked grimly, before Caius cut his hand through the air.

At first, Aurelius thought the Master of Shadows was attempting to make a hand signal to shut up, until Caius' hand cracked against an oak tree, and sent a figure rolling out from his hiding place into the foliage.

Aurelius moved over quickly to the fallen figure. The human was already dead, he knew, judging from the way his neck bent at such an unusual angle, and from the height at which Caius had hit him. In the grass next to him, lay a primitive firearm consisting of wood and iron.

'Good call, Caius,' he muttered to his friend. The Master of Shadows just shrugged. He'd done what was expected of him, nothing more. As they reached the far side of the hill's top though, Caius pulled his scope to his right eye, surveying the sight below them.

'More of them,' he grimaced. No one needed to know who he was referring to. After dissecting the data compiled in the final days of Horatio Ordias' life aboard the doomed Outcast, they'd all learnt enough about the infected to know that they weren't intelligent enough to employ weapons, apart from to bring down on another's head with blunt force.

They certainly couldn't aim and fire two missiles at a moving Behemoth in quick succession.

'So they haven't changed after all,' the Blademaster mused. 'Told you we should have burnt this place to the ground.

* * *

Leaving Caius and his hunters on the ridge to find their marks at long range, Aurelius led the remainder of the squad through the foliage toward the crash site for a better line of fire. Armed with the knowledge that most of the sensors in their weaponry rendered useless by the spores, mainly thanks to their existing experience in the Outcast, and several field tests by Aquila, Aurelius knew that with their limited supplies, closing the range would be the only option to ensure each round was a kill shot.

A curt wave from the Battlemaster spread the team further apart, widening the gaps between each Guardsman to ten meters.

'Better get moving, Aurelius,' Caius whispered into his head, 'I'm seeing a survivor down there, but he's surrounded.'

'Right,' Aurelius replied. He'd opened the link to the rest of the Guardsmen at his side at Caius' first words anyway. They all knew the situation. The Guard picked up the pace, but only fractionally. Surprise was always one's greatest ally, and to throw it away would endanger all of them. Besides, there were no sounds of combat ahead. The only possible explanation was that they had him captive. A mistake, Aurelius thought. They were safer just executing him; there were few outside the Guard who could break a Guardsman, and they certainly didn't number amongst the insects below him. Just then, Caius broke back in over the comms.

'You really better move it, Battlemaster; they're moving him to the other side of the wreckage, and I don't have a shot. And judging from the lads with those rifles, I don't think they're interested in a chat.'

Aurelius was about to reply, before a ringing detonation silenced them all. In an instant, he glided down the last few meters of the hill, rolling under the tree layer, to see the Guardsman in question; the Raven of the _Spirit of Iron_; Marus, from his armor, topple back without his head, with a blood stained human a few paces ahead of him, a cut down rifle in his hands, still smoking from it's recent discharge.

Aurelius forgot restraint in the same moment as his brothers.

A split second later after Marus' body hit the ground, the valley lit up with fire.

* * *

The Battlemaster burst into the clearing, still firing the hellfire rifle in his hands without mercy. A half dozen of the humans had already fallen in the time it had taken for him to reach the clearing, including the man guilty for Marus' execution. Aurelius managed a furious glance at the human's mutilated body, before he was forced to turn to a pair of humans on his left, who charged at him with desperation and vengeance. Others, meanwhile, milled about in confusion, or fear, screaming for the survivors to retreat before the military arrived. Why they thought him to be human military, Aurelius didn't know, nor care. He knew he was far worse.

Still fractured, just like before, he thought with a grin.

Aurelius ducked under the first man's clumsy swing with the heavy iron rod in his hands, even as he let the claw like attachments in his right hand lunge out into soft flesh. Impaled on the three Talons, the human groaned in pain and fear, seconds before his head exploded, as his frightened compatriot rained fire on the Battlemaster's dark form, only to find his friend jerked into his sights at the last moment.

He screamed in horror, until the voice died from his throat, and he could only gurgle as his own scarlet blood poured from the gash across his neck.

Leandros didn't even turn back to see his victim die, before he was on the now fleeing survivors.

A blade to the knee or leg was usually enough to send his target sprawling to the ground, screaming for mercy that had already died within the hearts of the Guardsmen. One way or another; by hellfire or honed blade and Talon, soon the field was littered with the dying.

The rest of the Guard followed up, dispatching the survivors with as little finesse as they could muster. The battle was already over now. All that mattered was vengence.

Aurelius only watched as Korventhor stamped a man's head; already matted with blood, into the damp grass, shattering the skull and brain beneath it. He saw Octavius and Titus catapult themselves into a fleeing man, before they tore him apart with blade and Talon.

Shallow breaths alerted him to a living presence on his left, and without looking, he snapped off a hellfire in the direction, and heard the wet impact of a solid projectile sinking into destroyed flesh and the organs beneath it.

Only after he saw Leandros descend upon on a survivor, did he turn about, to see a dead man lying slumped against the ruined Behemoth, clutching his gut with one hand, and a loaded pistol in the other.

It only proved to him that brutality was the only option when dealing with humanity.

That was until he turned back around to eye Leandros' handy work, and he shuddered inwardly.

'Maybe not that far,' he decided, taking in the bloodied Guardsman, and the sickening pile of bloody parts lying on the ground beside the desecrated corpse.

As far as deaths went, he decided, facing Leandros ranked among the worst.

* * *

'At least this one's alive.'

Rising from the bloody remains of the Behemoth's Raven and his late crew, Aurelius walked over to Caius and a small knot of Guardsmen, who hovered like crows over a bloodied meal.

The human spat blood on his approach, although unable to crane his head up to meet his killer, the life fluid only stained his shirt, and the mud beneath him. He wasn't too badly injured, Aurelius thought, aside from a gash across his leg and an arm that was broken backward. Across that broken limb though, he sported a dark green band, with a white insignia across it. Aurelius sighed as he gave up trying to decipher the vague symbol. It crudely like a half cog separated halfway by two stylized blades running down it's midsection. Or maybe it was some kind of insect. Must be running out of sigils, Aurelius though, thinking back to the majestic banners that once filled the skies over the battlefield of Lementus III. If there was one thing he appreciated during that war before he lost his legs, it was cutting down those bloody standards, and watching them burn; the countless hours of human artwork turned to ash in minutes, though it did take some time for a spark to take in the unrelenting blizzards.

'I ain't talking to military scum.' He spat again. Once more, Aurelius registered the growing gulf between humans in these dark times, and filed the fact away for later battles. If they could turn them on each other, it might solve most of the Guard's issues, particularly if they were opposed to the infected at the same time. His conscience clear, he stamped his foot down, digging his heel into the deep blade wound in the man's leg, and he heard his victim cry in pain.

'Want to explain why five of my brothers are dead?' he demanded, pressing his outstretched leg further into the wound as he hissed the words.

'What's to tell?' managed the human. Aurelius didn't buy that though; perhaps it was because they'd assumed the Guard were their human enemies, but he sensed that it was rather bloody luck that had led to the incident. Aquila had already reconnoitered the area over the past day, and no human presence had been found then. There was another agenda here, and if humanity was interested, so was he.

'I'd say it's dumb luck you came out here to shoot down a Behemoth. Why were you here in the first place?' At those words, he retracted his leg, only to stamp down hard on the man's knee cap, shattering the bone. A few seconds later, the man shrieked a response amongst the ghastly pain, although most of it was incomprehensible.

'Come again?' the Battlemaster asked, his eyes bloodshot beneath the helmet. Slowly, the screams, died away in the man's throat, and he looked up in fearful eyes.

'The girl...' he whispered hoarsely, 'we were trying to find the girl...'

'Really? All of you, off on a personal vendetta?' the Battlemaster asked, furious at the turn of events. He didn't question the man's statement, knowing it to be true, as the Storm told him. He simply cursed the universe, and mankind in general, and the bloody female that had indirectly gotten Marus and his team killed.

He didn't bother damning the men that littered the ground behind him though; they'd already paid the price.

'I don't have time for this.' he hissed, before he unleashed a single Talon, and swept it across the pleading man's neck.

* * *

'If you try and place anything else in my ship, Aurelius, it's not getting off the ground again.'

Aurelius leant back against the wrecked wall of the Behemoth as he mulled over the issue Decius had just thrown at him. Because of _Spirit's_ damn state as a heavy transport, it had been carrying a far greater capacity of supplies than Decius' Omen could ever manage in a single run. That, and the fact Decius also had to transport just under a dozen fully equipped Guardsmen, rather than four other lightly armed ship ensigns, made taking intact item from the Behemoth impossible.

He'd tried to prioritize medical supplies and ammunition over food supplements, since with their modifications at indoctrination into the Guard, the average Guardsman could fight for over a week without a meal without ill effect, although water was a different issue, hence the standard supply kit carried on each individual Guardsman included enough liquid to keep them in a fight for the same period of time.

However even with selective transport, Omen seventeen would still be unable to take off with the supplies Aurelius knew the 23rd would need over the up-and-coming days; three individual supply runs would be needed at the very least to get everything to the rest of the detachment, followed by a fourth to extract the dropped squad.

At least they wouldn't need to bring the bodies of their Fallen, he thought grimly. As the formal procedure dealing with excessive supplies being stranded in the field was their destruction by fire and demolitions, a cremation would have to be enough.

Just then, everything fell apart.

A commotion broke in over the comms channels, before Lucius; one of Caius' hunters who'd been sent to hold down the perimeter, crashed down the hill into the clearing, clawing at a human that clung to him like his own armor.

And it reeked of death. Not of life.

A shower of hellfires tore apart the infected human within the first few seconds of it's appearance, but Lucius instantly scrambled to his feet, neglecting any due thanks.

'They're coming,' he managed breathlessly, gesturing wildly toward the top of the hill, and squinting his eyes, Aurelius thought he saw movement in the treeline. There was no solid shape for him to acquire though, and their limited supplies couldn't be wasted at this range.

'You bitten?' Korventhor demanded roughly, to which Lucius only shook his head thankfully, before the Master of Ordnance finally lowered the heavy barreled Executioner in his hands. A multi barreled hellfire thrower, not much different to what he'd seen humans call miniguns, save for the munitions it belched, it was more than capable of obliterating a target at high speeds, at the obvious cost of accuracy, and Lucius let out an all too obvious sigh of relief when it lowered its gaze from the stricken Guardsman.

'Decius, get your Omen skyborn now,' Aurelius ordered, 'that is an order.'

'Aurelius, you can't get aboard this craft without unloading half the munitions you've packed in here. You're going to need to shove some of this out before you can come aboard.'

'No time,' Aurelius grimaced, 'link up with the others now. We'll catch up.'

There was a steel in the Battlemaster's voice that told the Raven it was not a matter worth arguing about.

'Aye, sir. Setting course now. Farewell, Battlemaster. For now at least.'

With that, the craft hurtled away from the ground, and into the horizon beyond them.

'So now what?' Caius asked grimly, eying the moving foliage about them, 'We stay here? Because I could really advise against that.'

'Agreed,' Aurelius breathed, relocking another clip into the hungry hellfire rifle at his side, and raising it to face the inevitable tide. 'We need a better defensive point.'

'There's a structure not far up the valley,' put in a voice that Aurelius took a moment to register, not expecting the Raven to still be within comm distance by now, given the absurd speeds Decius was known to travel at when the time was needed. 'Follow the river. Looks like some kind of wall built across the water. Human in nature, but it'll be better than nothing when the madmen come for you.'

Just then, a shape burst from the trees, flailing in crazed hunger, as it came toward the Guardsmen. It didn't get far, before hellfire fire tore it asunder, but at it's death, the woods beyond the wreckage; the ridgeline where the Guardsmen had initially launched their assault form, had come to life with screams and cries of madness. Time to bail.

'Grab whatever you can and break contact!'

It was probably the most irrelevant order Aurelius had given since the Excelon campaign, as the Guardsmen raked the woods with fire as they advanced, until their hands came into contact with a bags filled to the brim with supplies of whatever nature, before they took off, pedaling down the valley like there the Fallen were after them. Judging from the amount of noise the infected were making, Aurelius decided, there were far more than eleven Guardsmen could manage in an open clearing.

As their feet cycled beneath them, the Master of Ordnance whispered a final farewell to their fallen brothers, before he hit the detonator, triggering the charges he'd laid upon the bodies of the Fallen, and the carcase of the mighty vessel that belonged to the Guard alone. Even in it's crippled state, none other than the Guard could possess it. The cost would be too high.

The single explosion rocked the valley, before the ringing echo of the mighty inferno gave way once more to the cries of the horde.

Their hunger had been only delayed, and their pursuit would only end with death; theirs or their prey's.

* * *

**I think we all know where they're headed. Please review and thanks for the support**


	7. Cold welcome

_Battlemaster, this place is inhabited.  
__Last transmission from Guard recon detachment Sierra; first engagement of the Braxen IV campaign._

The cries of the infected still rang throughout the valley, though Aurelius was grateful to some extent that the rolling force of the river drowned out the better part of their blood calls.

On the other hand though, he had no idea just how close they were getting, and if they could be outrun at all.

He kept running, and kicked up his feet to clear an abandoned car that obstructed the road ahead. Evidently, this place had seen the apocalypse at its onset as well, and mad panic had accounted for some casualties too, judging from the skeletal corpse that still lay in the driver's seat. Aurelius gave little thought for it though - the wall was getting closer all the time.

It was an imposing structure, as it subdued the force of the brutal rapids to it's will, and Aurelius would have probably pondered on it for longer if a humanoid form hadn't burst out of the bushes to his right. They tumbled into the dirt, nearly rolling off the narrow road into the rapids below, before Aurelius was able to arrest the movement. The thing screamed and bellowed at him, trying to snap at any part of him. Ramming one armored gauntlet into it's throat, the Battlemaster felt bones crack under the force, but it kept moving. Just then, a boot slammed itself into the infected man's head, and ground it into the dirt in a bloody mess.

'Might want to watch out for the madmen, Aurelius,' the guardsman spoke as he offered the Battlemaster his hand.

'I'll take that to heart,' replied Aurelius, and he took the hand, before realizing the undergrowth behind his friend, near to the crash site, were moving.

'Lets go before the rest of them turn up then; we can't stay out here, Caius.'

'We won't have much time to fortify that place, Aurelius,' the sniper interjected, his words slightly jarred with every time his legs hit the floor, as they pelted towards the apparent sanctuary.

Aurelius had to acknowledge that. They might outrun the tide for now, but evasion was impossible right now whilst they were in the open, and the tide had shown immense endurance. Eventually, they would catch up, and the only option would be to fight. Just as he realized that he would once again be up against the new horrors the homeworld of humanity had spawned for him, Aurelius' eyes fell upon a small control center, positioned on the right side of the river. There was no way to cross that he could see, but there was a body of relatively calm water behind it.

'You think you could give us some time then?' He asked Caius.

'You mean that shack?' The guardsman turned to face the building Aurelius had gestured at with a nod of his head. 'Could be done; they can't swim, I hope, and we could hold that pos. while you prepare a nice welcome for the bastards at the fort.'

'We'll see you there then.' Aurelius replied.

Caius nodded his head in agreement, before he called away two of the three hunters at the center of the formation. Quickly, Castor and Marius broke away, unslinging their long rifles to begin the hunt.

* * *

'The gate's barred!' Called the guardsman at the head of the squad, though Aurelius could plainly see that. The wired mesh fence would have been little obstruction, if someone hadn't piled up a number of now ruined cars on the other side. One actually looked like someone had willingly driven the wreck up and over the other vehicles to complete the barricade. Desperation by any standards.

Fortunately, it seemed that whoever built the stockade had not reinforced the fenced sections to the sides of the gate with as much zeal. After sawing through the fence with an outstretched Talon, Leandros led the way through a small crawl space at the foot of the fence. Korventhor, being Korventhor, decided to quicken the process by kicking down part of the remaining fencing, enlarging the space by at least three times. Sighing at his friend's lack of restraint, Aurelius moved through last, coming up only another gate; this time one of wood and iron, but was heavily reinforced given the fact Korventhor was throwing himself at it but to no avail. The wall that surrounded the gate was also solid concrete, leaving no structural weaknesses for the Guard to take advantage of.

'What happened to 'nothing I can't get by?'' asked Leandros, a grin evident under his helm.

'There ain't,' came a stubborn reply from the guardsman at the gate, 'just haven't used your head yet. It should be thick enough.'

As if he was suddenly inspired by the threat, Korventhor turned about and then began making his way towards Leandros, and Aurelius might have let the angry Guardsman do so, if they were not being pursued by a horde of hungry Infected.

Perhaps fortunately for Aurelius, another voice saved him the effort of stopping Korventhor.

* * *

'Drop your weapons and get your hands in the air now.'

Aurelius didn't even have to look up, but he could hear weapons, likely to be rifles of some sort, arming above him, on the wall. The Guardsmen looked to him for guidance, and Aurelius could sense the unspoken question; should we get them, or spit on Corinthus' grave and put down the weapons?

Though he didn't like it any more than they did, Aurelius had a feeling that firing wouldn't have helped them much, as Guard armor was designed for stealth, not exactly heavy combat. They couldn't wade into a torrent of fire and survive, something which the humans above them seemed very capable of doing at the moment.

'Very well, drop them.'

There was a moment of hesitation, but eventually, the hellfire rifles hit the damp grass at their feet, though Aurelius did not hear the sound of Leandros' sheaths, and, with some misgivings, realized the Blademaster was no longer with them in the clearing. The woman who had first issued the instruction was speaking though, so he forced the thought of Leandros' whereabouts from his mind.

'What's the military doing out here? Got lost, or is it something we're not going to like?'

Again, Aurelius wondered if they resembled the Earth's current military in anyway, or if they were just not around a lot, which would explain why people had forgotten what they looked like, and why this whole mess had developed in the first place. He sensed though, that voicing that opinion would not be a good call.

'I'd put it more as something you are not going to like.' he honestly replied.

The woman's trigger finger tensed.

Wrong answer.

'As in there is a horde of mad men at our tails and we need some place that can be fortified in a hurry to make a stand.'

The woman took aim again, this time solely at Aurelius' head.

This is not going well.

'Then you came to the wrong place. Either get out of here, or we can put you down and save you the misery when they get you.'

'Not sure if I like those choices...'

'They're your only choices - you have five seconds.'

Then a shadow moved from behind her.

Aurelius still wasn't entirely sure how Leandros had ghosted his way inside the wall in time to aid them, when the Blademaster lunged for her.

Locking his left arm around the woman's neck in a choke hold, while his other hand held a short straight blade for throwing, Leandros positioned the leader of the humans between himself and anyone with a gun, as his blade hand drew back, daring anyone to move for him, and pay the price.

Pandemonium erupted.

People were baying for blood, ready to open fire, if Leandros had just given them a chance. In the meanwhile, taking advantage of the distraction, Aurelius, Korventhor and the rest of the Guard recovered their fallen weapons and trained them on the men on the walls.

It was a tinderbox environment ready to explode into chaos at any time.

* * *

'Look, why don't we all just put down the weapons, and work from there, eh?' Asked the Battlemaster, though his confidence was just a cover - he had no idea how this would go, and every moment it stewed, the larger the explosion would be. He was still trying to figure out how to reach Leandros, before he was shredded by fire from a dozen angles. While he was certain they could wipe out the humans here, it'd take too long, and they'd soon be trapped between two foes; one actually cogent and calculating, and another driven mad by hunger and madness. Those were two foes he didn't want to face at the same time, particularly when he was right between them.

'Yeah, why don't we?' asked the woman Leandros still held.

'Only if you're not responsible for that.' Leandros hissed, before he relaxed the pressure on her neck slightly to let her see the plume of smoke still rising from the wreckage of the behemoth in the distance, and the graves of five guardsmen. 'In which case, I'd rather you kept the weapons. I don't like killing unarmed opponents. Too easy.'

Nervously, she shook her head.

'Hunters.' She whispered. 'It would be hunters.'

'Which I take does not include you?'

Another shake of the head. Clearly though, Leandros had little trust in her replies, so he turned back to the Stormcaller, who still stood below his position, rifle trained on the humans in the other watchtower who threatened his friend.

'True or false?' He quizzed. After a moment, the reply came.

'True.'

'Great then,' Leandros exclaimed, before he turned back to the humans. There were about two dozen of them now, and each had some kind of firearm trained on him.

'So why don't we do this? I let her go, after you drop the guns.' Leandros noted. There was more uncertainty in the humans now though, with their leader at stake. Some's aims wavered, whilst others resighted their marks, trying to level their sights with the Blademaster's exposed head.

Wrong move.

* * *

With more than just one threat at hand, and no way he could threaten them all with a single blade at once, Leandros instantly reversed his grip on the blade, before he placed it to back of the human's head. The serrated edge pressed into her skin, though not so much that it drew blood. That wouldn't last long if they didn't drop their weapons. He'd served with Korventhor for long enough, and knew everything about humans; how to eliminate them the fastest route possible, or the slowest.

'Better drop those guns now boys, or you're gonna be cleaning up for a long time.'

He applied more pressure to his blade hand, drawing a trickle of blood, and eliciting a whimper from his hostage. That was enough to galvanize some movement, and one man stepped forward, his hands raised in a sign of peace.

'Maria, it'll be okay,' the man called out, before he placed the rifle in his hands on a oil drum. Soon, others followed suit.

'Alright, now let her go pal,' called the man who'd put down the rifle first.

'Do it Leandros,' Aurelius instructed. There was another agonizing moment of tension, before Leandros finally let her go, and she fell to the floor gasping for breath.

'Well, then,' the Blademaster said in a conversational tone, 'that wasn't too hard...'

He got no further before he sent the blade in his hand flying, into an arrow aimed for his head. The two projectiles cracked into one another, and they fell to the ground, the blade pinned solidly into the arrow's shaft.

His eyes instantly fell upon the origin of the shot, and the culprit; a girl standing on a raised platform several dozen meters away, another arrow nearly nocked in the string, green eyes boring into his own. Before she could finish though, Leandros let two of the five constantly concealed throwing blades in his right hand fly.

The first, barely longer than a matchstick, but still honed razor sharp and serrated, spun horizontally at his target, bypassing the obstructing wooden frame of the bow, before it severed the bowstring, letting the arrow fall to the ground, as the girl's pull suddenly exceeded the tension of the now non existent bowstring. The first blade also had the additional effect of burying itself in the girl's right shoulder, causing her to drop the weapon entirely.

Unfortunately, it also resulting in her hunching over to her right side, causing his second blade, which had been aimed solely for her head, to miss entirely, clearing her by a few centimeters before it struck a wooden post behind her.

Cursing his lack of foresight, Leandros prepared to throw another to finish the matter, only to be stopped by the black circle of a firearm's barrel aimed solely at him. The man behind the sights was not exactly new to the world, evidently from his greying hair, but he controlled the weapon; a short pistol with a drum shaped loading system, with a sense of familiarity. Leandros had spent a long time analyzing opponents in the field, and he instantly knew this one to be a dangerous one.

Which worried Leandros, since at this range, a bullet would easily outrun a blade.

'Stay away from her,' the man growled, his sights constantly locked on the Blademaster's head, as he moved to position himself between the girl and the Guardsman. As he did so, his finger slowly tensed around the trigger.

At the same time, Leandros quietly slipped another concealed blade into his throwing hand, his eyes landing on another nearby human that could be used as a hostage.

This would be interesting, he thought.

* * *

'Enough!'

With a final boost from Korventhor, Aurelius vaulted over the wall as he bellowed the words, landing heavily on his feet before he strode to the center of the courtyard he found himself in. Despite the fact many had reacquired their weapons after Leandros' throw, and now had them realigned on him and his fellow Guardsman, he spoke with authority, and in the moment, many sights wavered.

'There need not be any more violence. There will be more than enough very soon.'

'The hell there will be,' shouted one man, 'Just get out of here and move on.'

The call for their departure quickly began to spread throughout the human ranks, but Aurelius remained steadfast.

'We've wasted too much time as it is. The infected will be here, and we must ready to hold. There isn't much chance of escape now. Not with them so close anyway.'

Just as he spoke, Caius broke in on the comms. Before he could say anything though, Aurelius put it to the speakers. Whatever was happening, it couldn't be good, and they needed to know that there was no escape from the oncoming battle.

'Aurelius, if you're getting this, we can't stop them. They're on this side of the river as well! Marius was pulled over the edge by them; he's gone, dammit, open fire Castor!'

Gunfire cracked down the comm unit, alongside the inhumane cries of the infected.

'I'm breaking contact, say again, I am breaking contact. I'm going to try and draw them off, and then loop back about to give you more time. I hope you're ready, because there is a lot of them.'

'That's debatable Caius,' muttered Aurelius, considering the standoff that had occurred in the time they were supposed to be fortifying the place.

'Say again? Didn't hear your las... Shit! Fire, damnit Fire!'

The comm line crackled into static.

Looking up from the bead, Aurelius eyed the humans. They'd all heard it. They knew what was coming. They knew there would be no escape from the infected with so little time.

'Well, what are you waiting for?' he bellowed, 'Get those rifles pointed somewhere else, and maybe they won't find corpses when they get here, eh?'

* * *

**Not the best first impressions one could have, but what will happen next? Will the Guard and humanity join arms, or is betrayal around the corner?**


	8. Keep your friends close

_Don't worry about bad allies; they are always expendable means to victory  
Lucius Artonis, Shadow Guard Battlemaster, on fighting with the 91st Iron Guard_

* * *

'I don't trust them, Aurelius,' Leandros whispered though the comms. 'Not one bit.'

'The feeling is mutual, Leandros,' the Battlemaster replied, 'they'll have to substitute what we were supposed to have done in the time Caius has brought us.'

'And when it's over? What happens if they just throw us over to the horde, in their place eh?'

Aurelius sighed. Leandros was typically paranoid, particularly after the incident on Terra, when he and Caius had been marked for death by their brothers in arms; the Iron Guard. The relationship between the Shadow and Iron Guard was strained at best, with only the strong will of the council keeping the two from each other's throats. And sometimes even that wasn't enough, he remembered, glancing at Korventhor, who stood further along the fortified wall. His missing eye could be attributed to the Iron Guard's actions.

Funny that they couldn't even trust their so called battle brothers in the heart of combat, and he, despite everything, had thrown his lot in with the people who had damn well nearly wiped his race off the face of Lementus III.

He came to a decision. They'd hold off the horde, before they dealt with the humans. If there was any further sign of treachery, he'd give the order to open fire.

'Just watch your backs, brothers. Lets see off one enemy, before we dealt with our...allies of convenience.'

'Allies are for watching your back,' Leandros grumbled. 'They shouldn't be the ones you have to look out for.'

Yet it's the sad truth within our council, Aurelius realized. It would be an ironic twist of fate by the Great Father's hands if the humans here proved of more worth than the Iron Guard. He scoffed at the thought. Humans only looked out for themselves, and none others. If they'd really changed, he'd eat a hellfire.

The Battlemaster had seen enough of their inability to change all the way throughout the Excelon campaign.

* * *

The water of the dam still pounded in the background, though he'd learnt to tune the noise out a while back. Korventhor closed his remaining eye and listened, analysing each noise he could detect in the background, and systematically tuning out anything that would only be a hinderance in the oncoming fight; the birds chirping to the trees in mild conversation, the wind rustling the long blades of grass that decorated the approach to the dam...

He stopped.

There was no wind.

Reaching back for the Executioner cannon, the Master of Ordnance drew the mighty weapon, and leveled it out with the shrubbery beyond the fortified fence, searching for whatever was making the noise. His eyes fell upon a dark shape and he spooled up the cannon, ready to fire.

'Korventhor! Hold fire damnit!' Castor's voice broke his train of thought, and suddenly, a biometric lit up on his display, right where he'd been aiming. The Guardsman slowly rose out of the grass, hands held in the air, hellfire rifle still on his back, undrawn.

'Only me, man.'

'Test failed, hunter.' Caius put in over the comm net. A second biometric lit up, at least a dozen meters from Castor's location, though, try as he might, Korventhor could not locate the Master of the Shadows until he emerged from the long grass he'd ghosted through. 'If a one eyed trooper can see you, so can the enemy.'

There wasn't a reply as the shamefaced Guardsman moved to the now open gate, marching on through. Caius was right behind him, placing down a final obstruction for the horde before retiring.

'Get through that, bastards' he challenged the unseen enemy, as he finished locking down the sixth mine just out of hellfire range, before striding into the compound. At his back, detonations echoed throughout the gorge.

When the sixth was reached, the battle would begin.

* * *

'Fuck, just get it out.'

Curiosity getting the better of him, Caius followed the painful cry his ears had picked up, letting Castor take his place on the gun line. While the young Guardsman's stealth capabilities left much to be desired, his marksmanship was immaculate. He'd never let the boy now it, but he was almost as good a marksman as Caius was. It was time Aurelius and the others saw that.

Making his way into the nearby structure that the voice had originated from, Caius quickly realized that he'd entered the facility's infirmary. Two men lay on beds quite far apart from each other, both sleeping or unconscious, he couldn't quite tell. Apart from a rather ill tempered guard, and a significant cluster of people causing quite a commotion at the far end, the infirmary was empty.

'If you know what's good for you, asshole,' the guard told him, 'turn about and join your brothers.'

'Mind if you tell me what's going on over there?' Caius asked politely, thankful that he wasn't cursed with Leandros' short temper, lest he do something rash. 'I'm what you'd call a medic, I believe. Could be of some use.' As a scout, the Master of Shadows was always equipped to be self sufficient in the field, and thus carried an extensive medical kit on his person at all times. Besides, a fragmented message from Aurelius earlier had informed him of their unsteady alliance with humanity. Helping someone, he decided, might be the only way to solidify that, and prevent the humans from turning on their new allies first.

'You can fuck off,' the guard spat, 'you caused this anyway.'

'Bloody hell, let me guess. Leandros?' He could already guess the answer.

'Like I give a shit, now fuck off!'

It wasn't the answer he'd guessed at least. Just then though, another cry broke through the murmur of conversation at the far end, and a new sense of urgency broke through the crowd, and two men sprinted off to presumably obtain supplies.

'By the Great Father, it sounds like you're killing someone in there.' Obviously though, the guard had had enough.

'Get out of here,' he hissed, reaching for his sidearm, 'before I...'

The rest of the sentence died unspoken, as he slumped to the ground, unconscious, with an armored hand clamped around his mouth and a syringe loaded with heavy annesthetics pinned in his side.

'Should have done that at the start,' Caius muttered to himself, before he advanced on the knot of humans.

She was in a lot of pain, that was for sure, Caius noted. The wound in her shoulder was deep, and he thought he could see the thin hilt of an adamantium blade protruding from the wound. Leandros, without a doubt. The others were trying to extract the weapon, but to little avail, thanks to the dozens of inch long serrations on the blade's sides that deployed automatically a second after impact with a target, which made removing such weapons usually impossible without excruciating damage to the victim.

But Caius had known his friend too long, and shared secrets.

He coughed gently to alert the humans to his presence, and couldn't help grinning as the humans leapt back in shock at his sudden appearance. Staying silent on approach had become innate for him by now. The humans though, did not share his amusement.

'What the hell are you doing here?' demanded the grey haired man at the girl's side.

'Thought I could help,' answered Caius breezily, 'particularly since I believe the fault lies with one of my brothers.'

'We can't extract the blade,' a man on the side said, although a glare from a woman stopped him. Evidently, she did not want the guardsman playing any part in the operation. After everything he'd been through though, Caius would not be deterred. Trust might be the only thing keeping them alive in the oncoming battle.

'That would be because the blade's deployed serrations to prevent removal,' Caius put in. That stopped the latest attempts to remove the projectile. Slowly, he moved to the girl's side. She stared at him with a mixture of fear and contempt.

'With your permission?' he asked. No one replied him immediately, so before he was met with any protests, Caius darted his hands out. One grasped a syringe at his side and injected a purgance virus into the base of the wound. Knowing Leandros, the blade would have been poisoned with some substance designed to impair and crippled the victim in combat, though they were not usually lethal. The Blademaster usually saw to that himself.

Still though, the purgance virus would eliminate any remaining trace of the toxin, and any other pathogen the council had encoded it to kill. Then it would die, deprived of sustenance. It couldn't hurt, Caius thought, though he didn't quite mean that literally. Shadow Guard, while they always carried numbing agents and similar devices, rarely used their anesthetics, and the thought never occurred to Caius after so many years of treating his brothers. More often than not, they were used for non lethal pacifications, not unlike what Caius had just demonstrated on the short tempered guard by the exit.

The other hand grasped the blade's hilt and pulled the blade up by a a minute distance.

While he was met with a storm of protest at the girl's sudden gasp of pain, Caius continued, moving his fingers over the blade's exposed hilt until he found the fail safe Leandros had told him about.

'Just breath,' he advised calmly, before he eyed the girl. She'd need something else to think about when the next stage came. 'What's your name?' he asked in a conversational tone.

'Ellie..' she managed through ragged breaths. Caius thought carefully about how he was going to phrase his words for a few seconds, before he decided there was no easy way of giving the advice.

'Right then, Ellie, this might hurt.'

Brushing his index finger along the slight indentation, the blade suddenly snapped shut, as the serrations retreated back into the metal casing, though it also cut through flesh as it did so, and she cried out again. Caius didn't give much thought to it though; a serrated blade was a painful weapon to face, and pain was expected. Grasping the now straight blade at it's hilt, the Guardsman removed the heinous weapon for all to see before he placed it in the medical pouch at his side. A few seconds later, and the wound was closed; cauterized by the handheld laser in the medical pack.

'You might want to bind up the wound,' Caius mentioned briefly, taking advantage of the fact most of the humans were stunned at the technology he'd just demonstrated, and thus had momentarily halted their outcries at his uncaring methods. 'I'll take my leave then.'

'Wait,' a hand placed on his armored wrist stopped his turn turn toward the exit, as the girl reached out to him with her good hand.

'Thanks,' she managed.

'Anytime,' Caius replied curtly, before he marched off, outwardly showing not a care in the world. But inside the suit of armor, he was confused to say the least.

A human had just expressed gratitude for his actions. The people he could thank for every curse upon his species. The people whom his brothers would hate until the end of their days.

He quickened his pace, both to reach the battle before it began, and to escape the confusion the workings of a human mind.

* * *

'That's five,' Korventhor sounded off, as the fifth detonation thundered throughout the valley. Along the line, both humans and Guardsmen readied, training varying firearms on the inevitable horde, though there was a certain amount of distance between the two races on the line, creating gaps no one would fill, despite the cramped conditions at some points on the wall.

'Movement in the trees!' A guardsman called to his right. Sure enough, much like how Castor's inept movements had triggered motions throughout the undergrowth, the nature around the dam had seemingly come to life, where no wind existed to cause it.

Then the horde burst from the trees.

Moving in a loose gaggle, about two dozen of the infected lifeforms sprinted at the fort across open ground. One moved too close to the last mine Caius had set, and unleashed a three meter inferno that consumed another unfortunate.

In range.

'Open fire!' Aurelius bellowed, before the Guard let loose a barrage of firepower, cutting down the horde where they stood. The humans also added their contributions to the barrage, but were rather economic with ammunition, Aurelius realized, as carefully placed headshots found their marks, and infected tumbled over into pools of their own blood.

Of course; they were fighting human infected, not auxiliaries, who had most of their interiors redesigned for full combat. Thus, these would bleed just like humans, and die like them.

'Guardsmen,' he ordered across the comm lines, to prevent confusion with their 'allies' with additional instructions, 'We're not fighting auxiliaries; conserve ammunition, and aim for the vitals.'

Acknowledgement lights winked at him across his display, before the rate of fire from the gunline suddenly dwindled, as the Guard began selecting targets with greater care, placing hellfires into the hearts and heads of the infected, with the exception of Korventhor, who still opted to unleash the full fury of the Executioner.

Soon, the field before them was littered with the dead, their corpses broken and beyond repair.

'That's all of them?' asked the Master of Ordnance, eying Caius, who'd managed to rejoin the line prior to the ill fated charge. 'This ain't a horde. More like a small gang of thugs who wandered into the wrong alley.'

'That cannot be all of them,' Caius replied with some concern, 'I saw at least fifty of them bypass us at the outpost, and that was not including those that pulled Marius over.'

'Then where are they?' Korventhor demanded, 'I haven't even gotten started here.'

'They're inside the walls!' The cry took them by surprise, as it burst simultaneously from the radios held by some of the humans about them. At the same time, gunfire and screams echoed from the other side of the compound. Wearing a savage grin, Caius gestured toward the battle.

'There's your prey,' he told the Master of Ordnance, 'now the hunt begins.'

* * *

Moving at a sprint, Aurelius kicked in the head of the first infected that had scrambled into the perimeter. Behind it, the mesh fence lay broken, as more bodies poured through the breach in the flimsy obstruction.

'Fine day for the generator to break down,' moaned a man at his side, before he suddenly fell back with a shriek, as an infected human threw itself at him, driving its teeth into his soft flesh.

Aurelius let loose a barrage of fire, tearing apart both bodies in a fury of hellfires. He was already a dead man anyway.

Pivoting about again, the Battlemaster unloaded the remainder of his clip into the oncoming horde, until the rifle in his hands whined in protest, informing him that it's supply of hellfires had run dry. Only pausing to relock the empty weapon to his back, draw his hellfire pistol in one hand, and unleash is Talon in the other, Aurelius was upon the horde.

The first infected man to reach him was then blown back several meters, as a multitude of hellfire rounds struck him square on in the chest. Aurelius kicked in the heart of the next human, breaking her mutilated ribcage and rupturing organs, before he swung about, sensing a danger at his back.

He came face to face with another man dripping blood and matted bloody fungal growths from his nose, a rake in his hands, held overhead to collapse the Battlemaster's head.

Aurelius' hand slashed out, Talon outstretched, cutting through the soft tissue at the throat, and watched the infected human drop back clutching in vain at it's lifeline.

He didn't give it another thought, as he turned back to face the breach to face another infected human, although this one shocked him.

It's face was completely overgrown with the fungal parasite; seeming to engulf the human's entire head. What was more frightening was that the growths seemed to stem from where it's eyes once existed, yet it still moved with a purpose; straight at him in a bull rush, shrieking and clicking with it's destroyed vocal cords.

Only for it fall into the bloody mud at his feet, with most of it's mutated head gone.

Stunned for a moment at the sudden bloodshed without his input, he craned his neck over, in the vague direction the shot had originated from.

There, next to the doors to the infirmary, that auburn haired girl that had nearly cost his Blademaster his life stood, a pistol in her one good hand, with her wounded one steadying the grip.

'Well, I'll be bloody damned,' he muttered to himself, before another shower of blood hit him, as another of her rounds found their mark. As she was concentrating on the knot of infected near him, it was inevitable that she'd see his sudden distraction, and her head shot up irrately.

'You want to stop staring and start shooting?' She called over the gunfight, before she took up aim again, although the recoil of the heavy pistol in her hands, and the fact she was using her less prominent one to fire, sent her next shot narrowly past her target's head.

Only for it to be dropped by a rake in it's heart.

The wielder; the man who'd nearly taken Leandros' head back on the wall, only paused momentarily in acknowledgment to the armored figure, before he threw the shattered weapon aside, drawing his sidearm in the same motion, backing away from the horde as he dropped one after another with accurate shots.

Grinning under the helm, Aurelius hurled himself back into the melee, throwing hellfire and Talon into any twisted flesh that his eyes set upon. At the same time, the curiosity behind the Guard's attacks seemingly grew in strength at the sudden reprieve brought by their allies.

After all, there would be no worse shame then being outdone by a human.

Against the new determined might of the 23rd, the infected stood little chance.

* * *

The air still clogged with sickly smoke, Aurelius completed his final round on the perimeter before turning back toward the small town now known to them as Jackson. As he did so, he slipped a glance out at one of the burning piles of corpses that festered along the wooded hill that the infected had tried to climb, only to be annihilated by the 23rd when they had counter attacked through their own breach.

Further along in the trees, he saw other Guardsmen; Titus, and even further down, Octavius, re entering the woods, on the last patrol rounds before they departed this place for the operations center.

As he walked back up, picking his way through the lush undergrowth, he wondered what he was going to do with the humans.

Clearly, they were of no threat to his troops, at least for the time being. Some further along the breach had actually reported humans saving fellow Guardsmen with precise fire, while the favor had only been returned on notably fewer accounts then there could have been. Hatred still burned in most of the Guard, and they were only awaiting Aurelius' order to open fire into the backs of their true enemies.

Yet, Aurelius knew he couldn't. Something told him humanity had changed. Significantly. They didn't view them with open hatred, although distrust was present.

And perhaps some resentment at Leandros' rash opening 'greeting'.

He corrected himself there; there was definitely resentment there, particularly from the girl that had launched that sharpened stake. Possibly something to do with the envenomed blade that had lodged itself in her shoulder after the incident.

Yet she'd still come to his aid.

Why, he didn't know, as he thought back to the other humans they'd encountered; the ones that had lit up Marus' Behemoth and butchered it's crew like livestock. Perhaps they weren't universally united as he once thought; not all of them seeking the genocide of all who inhabited worlds suited to human life.

He made up his mind. His brothers weren't going to like it, but it was the right one.

* * *

'So what, you're...' the girl's speech was dragged out as she searched for the right phrase. before she settled on the same phrase the Guardsman had used earlier, 'not human?'

_And grateful for it_, Caius thought, although he didn't voice the remark. He was currently sat cross-legged, back against the front bonnet of long human vehicle that didn't seem capable of running any more, whilst the girl who called herself Ellie sat atop the same low platform she'd nearly fallen from when Leandros had first marched in, her legs swinging to and fro without any thought. Meanwhile, the man who'd remained obstinately at her side, leaned against the supports of the platform, his arms crossed across his chest as he analysed the Master of Shadows. Caius only gave him the occasional glance as he cleaned the Judgement rifle in his hands, unwilling to risk a confrontation with the dangerous human. Though he had only actually seen Joel once or twice during the melee at the breach, those few moments were enough to tell the Guardsman that he was not a man to cross. From the way he'd managed to break an infected neck in the manner he'd done so, Caius could tell that Joel had been in the business of killing for quite some time. Originally, Caius had come down to the central courtyard for some space to clean and calibrate his weapons, since there hadn't been many occupants down here prior to the pair's arrival, and those who were present stuck to the edges of the surrounding wall, as if the court yard might suddenly fall away to fire and magma beneath the surface.

Unlike the others though, the girl showed little distrust, and had somehow succeeded in opening up the Master of Shadows to talk, although to think of it, Caius thought ruefully, it wasn't hard eliciting a conversation with him. The hardest part, as Leandros so kindly put it on many occasions, was getting his trap clamped shut again. Evidently, Joel had reached the same conclusion, as his eyes wandered over the clear blue skies, the only reason behind his current place was the fact he wasn't willing to leave Ellie with a something that quite happily identified itself as an alien. Thankfully, at least the girl was still willing to soak in the information, although Caius had decided it was time to let them off the hook, and to show them up with some marksmanship.

'Correct.' he replied, as he raised his long rifle to his eye once again, calibrating the scope onto a distant target; namely an empty metal can he'd picked up from an unoccupied room after the battle and placed atop another ruined vehicle on the far side of the space. The Judgement rifle in his hands followed his movements; sweeping it's barrel up to draw a perfectly straight line between it's maw and the target he'd set it. He pulled the trigger back a single time, and watched the solid hellfire round fly true, splitting the makeshift mug into two significant pieces, and a good number of additional fragments. No one actually jumped at the firing of the silenced weapon until it actually found it's mark, just like so many of the Judgement's previous victims. The girl let out a low whistle as the Guardsman lowered the weapon, content with his calibrations.

'Nice shot,' she muttered, before she cocked her head toward him in mock dismay. 'You might want to lean into the stock a bit more.' she managed without a trace of sarcasm.

'You teaching me how to shoot?' Caius asked disbelievingly, although he couldn't quite manage it without adding an all too obvious sarcastic tone. How she had managed it, he didn't know. Thankfully though, the helmet, and it's monotonous speakers, was there to cover his shortcoming.

'Could do,' she replied breezily, and Caius was forced to turn about to face the girl he'd just spent the last ten minutes ranting at, giving her his 'summary' of the Guard, the Council, and their policies, although he had omitted any real history lessons of the 23rd in there. The last thing the humans needed to know was their own history, and their current position as one of the most dangerous creatures in the galaxy, at least on the Council's ranking.

'And I'll teach you on staying alive for another day. Rule one; don't try to teach me shooting heads. Rule two; don't shoot at Leandros.' He grinned to himself; he'd managed that line without an emotion. Maybe he was getting the hang of it. Unfortunately though, any evidence of the progress was wiped off the face of the planet by his helmet. The girl didn't laugh at that though, only glare out toward the defensive wall, and beyond; where she assumed the Blademaster to be. Of course, she wasn't linked into the Guard Battlenet, which constantly updated forces with friendly, and marked hostile, positions, otherwise she would have turned about to the dark shape in the shadows of the stables just a few meters away from her back.

'What is that guy's problem anyway?' she asked, rubbing her shoulder painfully as she said the words.

'Maybe something to do with the fact you tried to kill him,' the Guardsman put in, earning an annoyed glance from Ellie. Surprisingly though, it was the older man that answered.

'You can't trust anyone these days.' he told the Guardsman, unblinking, dark eyes staring into sunken black lenses. 'Last time we had a hostage situation, we lost Johnson and Max when they let Stephens go. He died as well, shortly afterwards.' he finished.

Caius let his back fall gently back against the truck's carcase once more. It made sense, he thought. And he was willing to bet that Leandros was already about to start throwing blades when the arrow had hurtled toward his head. Some allies they made, he thought bitterly.

'Nice to know. Well, you all lived,' he tried weakly, 'Word from the wise though; don't do it again.'

'The wise?' the girl asked, and Caius managed a sidelong glare at her in annoyance. The helmet still prevented any sign of his displeasure showing, though.

'I think I have more brain cells than the average Guardsman,' he returned.

'More than the average human?'

Caius gave up. He could continue to argue if he was hell bent on winning this, but the girl was either as stubborn as a mountain, or just a brainless git. There was more he could be getting on with in the time he had available then debate with a human girl.

Besides, Leandros was still crouched back there in the darkness. It couldn't help if they returned to the topic of the Blademaster, he thought, as he trudged away, trying to avoid turning around as he left, already sensing the smug victorious face at his back.

* * *

'I swear, if there's any connection between you and those corpses back down there,' Korventhor flared, gesturing violently back over his shoulder with a single outstretched thumb, 'I'm coming back to haunt you for the rest of your short lives.'

'Calm down, Leandros,' Aurelius managed, although he couldn't blame the Master of Ordnance. Without the Storm to tell him truth from lie in an instant, there would always be an instinctive distrust for humanity at his heart, just as there would always be for so many of the 23rd. 'There's no connection, otherwise they'd already be dead.'

'What? You'd have killed them?' he asked, turning about from the nervous humans in front of him to his old friend. Aurelius just broke into a savage grin, and laughed humorlessly.

'Nah,' he scoffed, 'I'd have just set you on them.'

'Works for me,' Korventhor muttered quietly at a volume only the Battlemaster could hear over the comms, before he strode toward the door. 'Give me a call if they give you trouble.'

Aurelius only grunted an acknowledgement; keeping his eyes fixed on the two humans that stood before him, until the door clicked shut behind the eager Guardsman, leaving him to study the humans that had fought beside his brothers. The woman that stood at the forefront of the pair; he recognised as the lady Leandros had taken as a shield earlier; the back of her blonde hair still stained red from where the guilty Guardsman's blade had drawn blood in his stand. The other man, he recognized as the slightly more civil of the residents here, being the first to open peace talks, though it was perhaps due to his partnership with Leandros' chosen victim. He had little doubt that they were the leaders of this little enclave of survivors, and he knew that the fate of the community would be decided by this meeting. Most of the Guardsmen at his disposal were already itching to begin shooting again, despite the contributions made to their continued existence by the humans. He'd need to make sure this went smoothly, lest honor incite a massacre.

'Apologies once more, about him,' the Battlemaster said carelessly, making a vague gesture toward the door as he did so. Korventhor never was one to forget grudges.'

'What the hell did we do?' the woman asked, and immediately, Aurelius knew he'd given away more than he should have. Humanity could know that the Guard were a 'peacekeeping force', they couldn't know their past crimes. He'd been over it enough already with the others.

'Apart from nearly kill us at the door, and have a kid send a sharpened stake at my Blademaster's forehead?' he managed, spinning the conversation away from dangerous waters and thankful once more that the helmet kept his broadcasted voice deadpan. As far as recoveries went, it wasn't too bad.

'You had my wife at knife point,' the man stepped forward at his own words, placing himself at the head of the trio. 'What did you expect was going to...'

'Educate me,' Aurelius grinned, 'I don't think like you. What did you think was going to happen? I'm no human after all.'

They stared at him as if it were some bad joke, before his rock solid stature finally convinced them that he was serious.

'Then what are you?' the woman identified earlier as Maria asked, her hand moving subconsciously toward the rifle leaning against the wall.

Before she could reach it, Aurelius recited everything he and Caius had agreed could be made common knowledge; the founding of the Council, the Guard, and the incident that had sparked their most recent assignment. Still though, unblessed with the Storm and unable to tell truth from lie in an instant, it still took them plenty of convincing to finally prove his sanity.

* * *

'Sorry, mate,' the human told him, a hand held open to halt any further advance past the door, 'you ain't allowed down here.'

He'd barely finished the sentence before the gauntlet balled in a fist connected with his head, sending him sprawling to the ground, unconscious.

'Needs must,' Korventhor muttered darkly, as he moved past the prone form on the ground, before blended into shadow. At his side, Leandros drew his own cloak around himself as well, until both were shrouded in darkness.

Letting a pin sized ball drop to the ground at his feet, Korventhor continued onward throughout the interior of the dam, regularly dropping the high yield explosives as he went. In the darkness on the far side, he saw another human drop to the ground suddenly, as the Blademaster throttled him until he could no longer obstruct the Guard's efforts.

* * *

After having been effectively ordered out of the facility, probably after literally alienating the two heads of the dam, Aurelius strode outside, into the sunlight, and grimaced. Though he didn't feel the temperature change, due to the constant moderation systems inside his suit that kept things suitably frigid, the warm rays of sunlight were effectively lighting him up for the world to see.

He'd have prefered to stay indoors, concealed in the dark.

Still though, they'd well overstayed their welcome. Their sudden appearance had cost the town of Jackson nearly half a dozen lives, and few wanted them and the trouble that followed them around any longer. Besides, Decius had dropped back into comm range, and was even now hurtling toward their position.

Turning about once more, the Battlemaster found himself face to face again with the man who'd identified himself as Tommy. Evidently, he'd decided to come along to ensure the Guard left for good. Surprisingly though, instead of a stark comment, he tossed Aurelius something that crudely resembled a hellfire clip, with a hole cut into the top half and grated over. He was almost about to through the explosive back at the man and order the Guard to open fire when Tommy's words stopped him.

'If you run into trouble out there,' he said, 'give us a call, and we'll see if we can help you out.'

Realizing it was infact a human comm bead, Aurelius could only nod his gratitude, still surprised at the measure. Thinking quickly of a means to return the favour, his hand fell upon the short barreled pistol on his chest.

'Grateful,' he muttered, before he thrust the flare gun into Tommy's hands, 'Most of our comms are out at long range though, with these spores. Take this and fire it up if you need a hand as well. We'll see it from a long ways off.'

He wasn't quite sure of how the human viewed his reply, so he kept with silence. The last thing he wanted was owing a human.

There wasn't much of a farewell, as the Guard marched out in open formation once more, neglecting any formed march that were so common in the militaries of the world that still existed, at least in times of needing to impress civilians.

For the Guard, they just didn't care, particularly in the case of humans.

* * *

'So how was your excursion?'

Aurelius just groaned a response down the comm link with the persistent Raven, before he strode through the entrance ramp, taking a seat beside the open door.

'Wondering if you'd do the honors?'

The Battlemaster turned his eyes away from the open fields that still swayed in the wind, to see a detonator presented in front of his face.

'Charges put in place, as you requested,' reported the Master of Ordnance, before he shook the offered hand to emphasize his point. 'Care to deal with it, or shall I?'

Feeling every eye in the vessel set on him expectantly, apart from Decius', who was currently initiating preflight protocols, Aurelius slowly took the offered device from his friend's hand.

'Kill anyone to plant them?' he asked, tilting his head to face the two Guardsmen that had been charged with the duty, eliciting two obstinate shakes of the head.

'Only two idiots unconscious,' Korventhor told him, 'won't remember a thing; I think I hit him hard enough.'

At that, Leandros let out a bark of laughter, before the Omen began to lift off beneath their feet. As it did so, Aurelius only turned back to the detonator, flicking the safety latch on and off as he did so. The town and community of Jackson filled the open door as Decius dragged the sleek vessel up into the sky

'Good.'

With that, he let go of the rod, letting it fall away into the river below them, safety trigger unremoved.

* * *

**If you're reading this, thanks for the support; more will be on the way. Sorry I haven't been very consistent with updates; I started writing this sometime back in no chronological order, so can't make any solid timeline for updates. Next part coming soon!**


	9. Firebase Spectre

_Peace is only a way of stating a ceasefire; the only guarantees in life are war and death._

_Battlemaster Julius Fornus; 1st Shadow Guard; refusing an honoured retirement after the Charon campaign_

* * *

'Call it what you will, Battlemaster,' Leandros scoffed as he departed the landed Omen, 'I call it going native.'

The last out, Aurelius followed the resigned Blademaster outside, into a darkened clearing only a few kilometers from their last battle.

With camouflaged netting designed for woodland terrain thrown over and between the few standing buildings remaining in the small town, concealing the position from aerial threats, the vanguard force of Guardsmen had fortified the small settlement into an outpost worthy of a firebase. Barricades decorated nearly every pathway into the outpost, whilst the few select open paths were ridden with hidden dangers, including mines and overlooking hunters armed with long rifles.

The five Omens that had survived the run down from the fleet in orbit lay parked in the open square, where there hadn't been sufficient supports or supplies to allow for netting to cover it. Rather, their dark shapes would conceal the last remnants of the ruined town.

In the time the troop contingent of Omen seventeen had battled through the Jackson valley, select kill teams had scourged the town clean of all life; rodents, infected, and human survivors; all were subject to the purge, although none of the latter had actually been encountered, even in the sewers below, which had then been filled with rubble from two of the more heavily damaged structures. Now, all that needed to be patrolled was the surface, as hunter teams roamed the foliage beyond the town, ever vigil for life, ready to end it.

Nodding a greeting to a pair of off duty Guardsmen in the streets, Aurelius halted only momentarily to assess the preparation of the base one last time, before he moved off again, satisfied, though he couldn't say the same with the mindset of his forces. He sensed he'd made the right choice; it was only a matter of if the others would see if such was the case.

* * *

'Keep it down,' Caius grunted in frustration, as the two hunters at his side struggled to keep the infected form that the girl from Jackson had described as a clicker pinned to the ground, all the while dragging it toward the makeshift operating table. After winning a debate with Aurelius on the safety behind his suggestion, Caius had taken Lucius and Castor into a desolate town on route to Spectre.

Unlike Spectre though, which had been relatively clear on the Guard's arrival, aside from the stray infected, this one was infested with all kinds of specimens.

With his two hunters, Caius had succeeded in taking down four isolated individuals, before the team had managed to take one alive, though the noise it generated had nearly ended them by drawing in it's brothers, prompting the team to tear out the creature's mutilated voice box, enabling their escape with both the clicker and four bodies in tow.

Finally wrestling the damnable beast to the desk and relocking it's restraints to the edges of the structure, Caius surveyed the creature with some dismay. The most of it's head was unrecognisable; overgrown with the fungus that had displaced it's eyes long ago. Inwardly, he knew it would be even more horrific on the inside.

'Needs must,' he muttered, drawing his blade as the words left his mouth.

* * *

Aurelius kicked his feet up on the desk he'd been left in the CCC with some disdain. It was far from the field operations centers he'd usually operated Guard combat missions out of on past campaigns, but the majority of the materials for the center had been lost with the Behemoth in it's fiery demise. Thankfully though, amongst the satchels they'd pulled from the wreckage in the final moments prior to the detonation, a command helm had been retrieved. Designed to allow for total interface into the Battlenet, they were usually accompanied by a command set for faster implementation of orders, though in emergencies, the user could utilize their own voice, although by now, Aurelius would have gladly killed to get his hands on an intact set, or several.

Being the lone operator of an entire vanguard force, where usually at least a dozen would have aided him, wouldn't have been too daunting a task, if that small force hadn't been split into at least fifteen different two man patrols in an eight kilometer radius about the base, with another ten manning the defenses, all sending back real time reports of their status.

Not to mention there were also updates from the research bay and the armory, with either how it was impossible to extract the parasite alive for extensive study, or how short on munitions they were.

'Bloody hell,' he whispered, resigned to his fate, at least until Caius walked in, splattered in dark red blood.

'There's as little a chance of extracting the parasite intact as seeing getting your balls through a storm on Lementus intact.'

Given the fact storms on his homeworld could reduce one to bloody shreds in a matter of seconds with it's diamond rains, Aurelius couldn't help but grin at the thought. Plus, Caius' arrival gave him a chance to get away from that bloody helm, and he promptly tore it off. It would give him a warning anyway, if something went wrong.

'Might be tempted to try,' he replied, 'if it'll just get get us out of here.'

'I'd drink to that,' Caius interjected, 'if we had a bar around here somewhere. Humans love their drink; whole damn place is ransacked already.'

'So then what? We can't implement it into the kill codes for the Purgance virus?'

'There is a minute chance,' he replied, 'but even then, it would do us no good. We cut away all infected regions another runner Titus and Remus caught in the southern sector, and it still didn't heal him. Whatever damage the cordyceps does, you can be pretty damn certain it is permanent.'

Aurelius leaned back, trying to think of a solution to the problem Caius had just set him. If the pathogen did permanent damage, even if they unleashed a purgance virus, they'd still be left with a world of mad men who'd oppose the Guard to the very end, until death. They'd have to purge the bloody world, virus or not. Finally, he glanced back at the Guardsman, sensing the Master of Shadows had some vague sense of a viable plan.

'You want to share what's up in that head of your's?' he inquired.

'We stumbled on a human research facility in the town we took the first five subjects from. The place was infected, of course, but I couldn't help but check what actions humanity had tried to stop the outbreak. Ever heard of a vaccine?'

Aurelius just shook his head at that. Ever since the creation of the Purgance virus thousands of years past, close to the Council's founding, and well before the 23rd's founding, the idea of creating an immunity was long past when one could simply press a button and watch the infection die.

'It's a synthetic, immunity, to a pathogen, to say,' Caius explained, and Aurelius just nodded his understanding, still uncertain of where Caius was going with this.

'It could make us immune to the disease; allow us to combat it just like any other foe without fear. Should be a hell lot easier to generate than a Purgance virus target. And allow us to bring down the auxiliaries. Unleash the full might of the 23rd.'

Finally, understanding of Caius' plan dawned on Aurelius. With no support from auxiliaries due to the lack of respirators in their gear, the 23rd effectively summed up to perhaps a thousand Guardsmen, probably less. It was far from the numbers they'd need to take on the vast hordes of infected across the globe, that, from Caius' predictions, numbered well over four billion individuals. But once they could bring the thousands of auxiliaries held within the bays of the four ships in orbit online, without fear of friendly forces turning on their brothers, the battlefield would be leveled with ease.

And if everything went to hell, the outbreak could still be contained, with no more potential victims of the infection, reinforcements could arrive to end the war with the time brought.

'So where do we start?' Aurelius asked. At that though, Caius gave him a slight inclination of the head.

'I have absolutely no idea.'

* * *

Over the next two days though, the mood around the firebase grew in spirit, as work on a 'cure' finally got underway. After several hits on abandoned medical facilities and gaining further scientific insights into the disease, Caius and his science team, who arrived just a day after the fire base's establishment via Omen. were finally able to begin work on synthesizing a 'vaccine'. With no shortage of bodies, as patrols encountered increasing Infected activity as their sweeps brought them further from the isolated hamlet into overgrown towns, extractions of the parasite became easier and easier with practice.

Unfortunately though, even with the dozens of samples brought back from the field, the task was quickly proving to be an impossible one. With only extremely corrosive substances that would kill any Guardsman with ease preventing further fungal growths, Caius couldn't quite see a means to an end.

Their latest attempts had involved some of humanity's oldest methods; using weakened samples to try to boost a Guardsman's immunity to a level at which he could actually withstand an actual infection.

The test results on the synthetic model proved disappointing.

Another failure.

'You know what would be great?' Caius asked suddenly, jolting Aurelius' gaze up from lukewarm ration pack on his desk, 'If we could find someone who was already immune. That would solve all our problems right now.'

'You willing to give that a try yourself?' Aurelius scoffed, taking another mouthful as he said the words, already seeing him his mind the Guardsman trying to taunt a clicker to take a chunk out of him just to see if he was immune.

'Nothing that drastic,' Caius grinned, seating himself down beside the Battlemaster and the two other Masters of the 23rd, 'but think about it; would be a real bloody milestone in this hell wouldn't it?'

'I'd say,' Korventhor put in, placing his arms on the table and locking them together to form a steeple, 'that your chances of that are as low as finding a Council member out here.'

'Ain't that the truth,' Leandros muttered, before he piped up as an idea struck him. 'Why not just test it on a human? Expandable, and easy to kill if it gets out of hand.'

'Nice try, Leandros,' replied Aurelius, though he sensed he'd need to steer this conversation away from dangerous waters before Leandros got back onto the topic of Jackson. The town's continued existence hadn't exactly boded well with most of the Guardsmen, though they'd kept their opinions to themselves. Leandros though, as a Master of the 23rd, was entitled to voice his own opinions with the Battlemaster, and he was still confused, if not downright pissed about Aurelius' choice to spare those he hated with a vengeance.

'Why not?' he grunted, 'We just head back to that dam in the middle of the night, raze the defenses, and then make the largest ruckus we could ever make and let the infected do the work. Anyone who survives; that's our ticket out of here.'

That stopped Aurelius mid sentence. Too late.

'Or,' Leandros continued, 'we just extract from this hell zone, and drop the ordnance.'

Thankfully though, an alarm blared over the rant, and another inevitable debate on what to do with the humans at the Guard's backs.

Relocking his helmet over his head once more, Aurelius sprinted outside with the other occupants of the mess hall in tow, to spot a gleaming crystal light up the sky on his helmet's display.

Though to the naked eye, it would have been a mere spec; impossible to see at this distance, even against the clear blue sky. But on a Guardsman's helmet display, it was a different story, as it pulsed clear white, emitting wave after wave of white pulses across the display, almost like ripples across a disturbed pool of water.

'Forus,' Aurelius shot down the comm line, 'who just fired up the emergency beacon?'

Moments later, the comm specialist that had arrived from the _Armageddon_ just a day ago, to relieve some of the mounting pressure on Aurelius, replied him from the Combat Command Center.

'Unknown, Battlemaster. No friendly patrols under the target coordinates; all units still reading green; they're just waiting on your orders to move on the target to assist.'

'Isn't that where Jackson is?'

Aurelius suddenly jolted his eyes back onto the screen, where the airborne flare blared it's signal twice more before it fell off screen; obstructed by the mountains beneath it.

'Correct there, Caius,' he muttered, recalling the flare he'd left with the humans, in payment for the derelict radio they'd offered up. 'Decius, get seventeen ready for lift off. I want first squad aboard now.'

He closed the second comm line, before a hand on his arm stopped him.

'You're not really considering going back there?' Leandros asked, incredulous. Even Korventhor seemed hesitant for the first time, uncertain if combat was really the correct choice here.

'You'd give up a chance for another fight, Blademaster?' Aurelius shot back. A moment later, the Guardsman finally shook his head in reply.

'Never would,' he called back, before he sped off to grab his gear, Korventhor in tow. Despite his hatred for humanity, Aurelius knew he could always rely on that killer instinct at the Guardsman's heart to convince him to join the battle once more. As he moved for the Omen though, Corinthus' voice stopped him.

_What the hell do you think you're doing, Stormcaller?_

It sounded almost as if the late Battlemaster was standing at his side as the words hissed into his head, clear as comms. Though Aurelius had always felt his old friend's presence and advice on many occasions since his death, this had to be the time of it's greatest clarity. What the hell was he actually thinking, putting his brothers' lives at risk. For what? A human settlement, that should have fallen at his hands two days ago. His past screamed at him to abandon the mission; to let them die.

Yet something else; another presence, or maybe just his gut, told him he would be wrong to do so; that it would be the decision of a traitor, not a Guardsman.

Resigning himself to his fate, Aurelius stepped aboard, and locked himself into his seat, waiting once more for the hell of war.

* * *

'Great Father,' Decius breathed, 'we've got a hot spot.'

Only pausing momentarily to contemplate the understatement, Aurelius turned his eyes back on the blazing inferno that had consumed the town. Fires spread rampant throughout several buildings, eating away at the timber constructs, all the while devouring the countryside about the settlement.

And gunfire blazed back and forth, whilst not a single shriek or cry of the infected reached his ears.

No, only the cries of the wounded and the dying.

'Maybe this was worth my time after all,' Leandros mused cheerfully, considering the prospect of human opponents once more, just before an explosion below rocked the ship.

'Doesn't look like the battle's going the way we want it,' Aurelius put in, as the cloaked vessel passed the wreckage of an isolated home outside the town's fortified perimeter, and the charred corpses of it's past inhabitants. 'Put us down as close as you can Decius. Once that's done, I want you on the perimeter. No one gets in or out of this hell zone until we establish what the hell is going on.'

'Affirmative,' replied the Raven, before he slammed a hand into the controls, 'putting us down about a kilometer out from the town. Drop lines are away, and may the Great Father guide you, brothers.'

'May he guide us all,' Aurelius muttered quietly, as he moved back to the main troop bay. The hatch slid open, and the black lines began their rapid descent.

'I abandon my hopes of the coming dawn,' the Battlemaster voiced, though he was quickly joined by the eleven brothers at his side, as they recited the vows they'd taken so long ago, in the space above their homeworld.

'I forget my fears of the eternal dark,' his hand found the drop line, and locked the sturdy magnetic wire to his belt.

'I accept death as my fate.'

His feet kicking off the steel floor, the Battlemaster sailed away from the Omen, toward the ground and battle below.


	10. Haunted by the light

_You can't outrun your past and sins.  
Cornelius Sacratus; Heretic and Traitor of the Council; his last words before execution._

* * *

He kicked back the deployment line, detaching the magnetized strip from his tac belt, before the Battlemaster drew his hellfire rifle and advanced toward the scene of the carnage. At his back, the rest of the Vanguard moved up in diamond formation, with Leandros and Korventhor at his flanks, and Caius directly behind Aurelius. Along the far right side of the command group's advance, the rest of the Omen's contingent stealthed their way through the woods, searching for any glimpse of a human foe, perhaps in still searching for some form of vengeance against their old foes.

'Eyes up; contacts far right.' came a crack of static.

'Friendlies?'

Unknown, Battlemaster. Uniformed troopers; certainly not from Jackson.'

'Make contact, I'm on the...'

'Shit! They're opening up on us! Castor's hit; returning fire now!' Fire rattled on the other side of the comms.

'Castor? Octavius? Respond.'

'Alright sir,' came Castor's voice. 'Winded, but I'll be fine. Just a graze. But Battlemaster; there's a number of casualties here. And they aren't wearing that bloody winged insignia.'

'Then mow the bastards down.' Aurelius gave the curt order without hesitation. Despite the fact they'd nearly killed him on his approach, they'd fought together soon afterwards, and little bonded Guardsmen to their allies better than the heat of combat, with the exception of the steadfast Iron Guard.

But now these people had massacred them, and opened fire on the 23rd.

He'd make them pay.

'Understood, Battlemaster, engaging now.' Octavius winked off the comms, and soon, the bark of hellfire weaponry resumed, echoing off the valley's walls to Aurelius' right, and the curses and screams of their victims.

'Battlemaster,' came Lucius' voice, 'got something here - friendlies pinned down. Looks like a lot of hostiles.'

'Engage,' ordered Aurelius, 'We're on route.'

* * *

A few minutes later, Aurelius crouched in the shadows of the woods, surveying the scene. A number of bodies, each bearing the same stylish marking on their forearms that he'd seen earlier at the crash site of the Behemoth, littered the ground

'Small world,' he hissed to himself. If the Guard weren't fully dedicated to this battle yet; saving human allies, they would be now, if only to take it out further on the killers of five Guardsmen. However, human gunfire, from the way rounds seemingly detonated from barrels, rather than how hellfire rounds cracked on launch, still echoed on the other side of the farmhouse, indicating someone was still holding, at least for now.

'Castor, Lucius,' Aurelius addressed the two hunters that had discovered the position via the comms, as to reduce the chances of being overheard, even though every other life form within visual range was lying face down in the mud. Caution was always approved on the battlefield.

'Work your way around to the right. We'll approach from the left, and we'll hit them simultaneously. Let none survive.'

'Aye sir,' came the reply. As they moved, Aurelius thought he may have caught a glimpse of the two shadows moving off deeper into the undergrowth to circle about. He shot an accusing glare at Caius, who only shrugged.

'Can't say they're my best,' was his only reply.

Aurelius moved on, though he still bristled at the fact he'd been able to detect them. If a hunter could be detected by anyone below the Battlemaster in terms of detection, they were already dead.

Thankfully, the human standards for detection were significantly lower than that of the Guard, and besides, the humans that might have posed a threat to the two inept hunters were too occupied with rooting out those still trapped within the farmhouse, at least until the hellfires started raining down on them. After a short, unevenly matched battle, they too joined their comrades in death, and Aurelius moved toward the house. He'd tasked the squad with continuing onwards toward the town, eliminating any opposition they found, whilst he investigated the situation. Apart from a knife wielding maniac wearing a Firefly insignia at the door, who met his end at the hands of his own weapon, Aurelius met little to no resistance, as he made his way upstairs.

The floor joints creaked softly as he advanced up the stairs, serving to warn anyone above of his approach, to prevent panic from making hasty judgements.

The first two rooms he entered were both clear, apart from a pair of fresh corpses; evident victims of the firefly attack. Their weapons lay at their sides, and Aurelius was surprised to find each held no more than three rounds in the rifles they carried. The primitive weaponry was of no use to him though, so his only real delay was pausing to close the eyes of the fallen. Even though he still thought of them as potential foes, they'd still died good deaths, protecting their homes.

Just like thousands of the 23rd in it's early days, and it's near destruction at the hands of humanity.

Suddenly, their sacrifice was lost on Aurelius, and he moved on, down the corridor to the last room.

* * *

The door inched open, though Aurelius could make out no one yet. Part of him wanted to burst inside, throwing caution to the winds, and discovering if the Guard's efforts had actually been for nothing, or if there were still survivors. The only problem was that he could still easily be mistaken for a firefly, and...

Movement.

Perhaps it was instinct built from millennia of combat, or his sensitivity in the Storm that warned him of the oncoming attack, but regardless, the Battlemaster threw himself backwards, just as the sharpened edge of a fire axe swung into the door, where his head had just been a couple of seconds ago.

'Great Father,' he breathed, as he rolled back up, drawing his hellfire rifle back onto the doorway, which had been driven shut again by the force of the blow it had sustained.

'Battlemaster Aurelius, 23rd Shadow Guard,' he shouted at the door, 'Identify yourself.'

No reply came immediately, but slowly, the door slid back open, revealing the man he recalled to be Joel. He did not carry a firearm, only the sledgehammer from earlier that had nearly ended the Battlemaster then and there, though Aurelius noted with some concern that the man still held it up, ready to swing it at his skull again.

'Easy there,' Aurelius muttered, before he holstered his own weapon, reactivating the magnetic restraints before he locked it to his back once more. Subconsciously, he spread his hands open at the same time, in a gesture of peace, until Joel did the same.

'Wasn't expecting to see you again so soon.' he shot out, still wary of the Guardsman's appearance.

'Well, someone called,' Aurelius responded, miming in the air the transmission beacon he'd left with Tommy. Realization dawned on Joel, and he sprinted back into the room, prompting Aurelius to follow.

There were only two others inside; the girl who'd tried to gut Leandros back at the dam, and a man he didn't recognize, though, Aurelius noted, judging from the wound in his stomach, he'd already passed a while back. Joel went past his surviving companion though, grabbing his backpack, muttering his brother's name again and again.

In his current state of distress, Aurelius wouldn't have blamed him if he hadn't realized he'd been shot.

Blood trickled from a wound on the man's left thigh, but he kept moving, only prompting more blood to flow.

'You know that you need to get that patched up, Joel,' Aurelius began, but the second he started speaking, he instantly dove to the ground, as the girl, Ellie, he remembered, reacted instantly to the sound, and Aurelius kicked himself mentally for neglecting to make some kind of noise to mark his presence to a girl who'd been facing away from the doorway during his entrance, and who was currently armed with a rifle.

'Joel! Behind you!' she shouted, before a round erupted from the barrel of the rifle, and shattered a picture frame on the wall a few feet above Aurelius. Again, he held his hands out in peace.

'It's me, dammit, girl.' He growled the last few words, more to himself than anyone, but the noise still reached her.

'Well, I'm sorry,' she retorted, recovering fairly quickly for someone having just seen a fully armored guardsmen seemingly materialize behind her, 'Those assholes already tried coming in several times. Could you like, make a noise or something. You nearly scared the shit out of me.'

Aurelius gave her a withering glare, though it was lost on Ellie, as the helmet hid most of his features. Only another Guardsman could have been able to tell the subtle movements that conveyed feelings past the cold armor.

'It's Aurelius right?' She asked, taking in the tell tale tinge of red on the inner side of the cloak worn by the Guardsman that marked him as the Battlemaster. Aurelius just nodded in reply, still contemplating how quick people were ready to kill in these times, before Ellie noticed her companions' wound. Evidently, she'd been concentrated on keeping the Fireflies at bay with the rifle whilst Joel had tried to hold the interior of the house, and thus had not witnessed the injury.

'Shit, Joel,' she whispered, abandoning the rifle and Guardsman to move to the man's side, 'You're bleeding.'

'I'll be fine, Ellie,' came the gruff reply, 'but Tommy's probably in trouble too. We need to get back to the town.' The wound was finally catching up with Joel though, and he grabbed at a nearby counter for support.

'We'll see to it,' Aurelius put in. 'We'll get your brother out of there. You though, need to get that patched before you drive yourself into the ground.'

Without waiting for a reply, he opened up a comm link. Claudius and Remus' acknowledgement lights winked green inside the helmet.

'Claudius, Remus, get your sorry arses over here now. I need you to hold down the building at my current position. Get a fall back position set up here on the double.'

'Aye sir, breaking contact now.' came Claudius' voice.

'By the way, we got two humans here; one's wounded. You're on babysitting.'

Before the Guardsmen on the other side of the feed could argue, Aurelius cut the feed, grinning to himself. In front of him though, the two humans looked offended.

'Babysitting?' Asked Joel, an eyebrow raised at the Battlemaster. Aurelius just shrugged.

'Well I'm sure she could do it,' replied Aurelius, gesturing toward Ellie, 'but I'm sure you don't want here telling everyone that you got your arse saved by a girl. Two Shadow Guardsmen; would make it look like you were in a bit more shit than you really were. Besides, they've needed some damsel to save.'

He turned about and left the duo, and Ellie's laughter, behind him.

* * *

Toying with the blade in his hand, Caius twirled it about twice more before he sank it into the man's neck, his other hand still clamped firmly around the man's mouth. Blood ran from the wound, and his victim died soundlessly, before Caius lowered him into the undergrowth of the forest. To his far right, judging from the sudden outburst of gunfire, Leandros and the others had made contact as well with the second Firefly group they'd encountered since landing, and soon, the chatter of the crude human projectiles gave way to the crack of hellfire fire.

'Where were you, I wonder?' asked Caius to the dark shape at his back, and not for the first time, Aurelius realized his efforts of ambushing the Master of Shadows was an impossible task. Still though, it would have been a nice change in pace. It might have stopped the chain of comments at least for a day.

Or at least a minute.

'Claudius and Remus are setting up shop about a half kilometer at our backs, at the farmhouse we found earlier.'

'Great,' Caius replied without turning, as he wiped the serrated blade against the blades of grass that carpeted the ground under their feet, 'Any survivors from the attack?'

'Just the girl who tried to stick Leandros when we came in, and the older man that's always with her.'

'I'm sure Leandros will be pleased to hear she's still functioning,' grinned Caius, before he slipped the blade back into it's sheath. He gestured off toward the nearby massacre, where the Guardsmen had emerged from their concealed positions, and were now moving amongst the corpses for anything of use.

'Where's Korventhor by the way?' asked Aurelius, remembering that, upon his approach, his ears had not picked up the unique sound of the Executioner cannon spooling up to fire, nor it's piercing screech after it actually began firing.

'Sent him off on a side road,' the reply came. 'We heard some vehicles, and Korventhor's the best at denying their use, so I sent him to get rid of them.'

Even as he said the words, the comms opened up, and Korventhor's voice broke in.

'Korventhor here, Caius. Managed to hit the trucks, but one made it through the net. In pursuit now.'

'Alright, Korventhor,' Caius replied, rising from his seated position as he did so. 'What's it's destination? We might be able to intercept it before it gets away.'

'That thing ain't getting away,' the broken response came, as the words were jolted from Korventhor as he sprinted after the surviving vehicle, 'It's headed straight into the lion's den.'

'Jackson?'

'I'll get them when they slow down. Good hunting boys. Korventhor out.'

The link cut, and Caius had been about to turn about to face his Battlemaster, if Leandros hadn't sprinted into the clearing at the same moment, holding a human radio.

'Aurelius! We found this on one of the guys back there; they're saying a mad man ambushed the convoy for Jackson...'

'Yes, that would be Korventhor's work,' Caius interrupted in a chatty tone, but Leandros shook his head.

'One survived, and it's carrying more than enough men to finish the job; we got at least fifty contacts all about Jackson, tearing the place apart, and another dozen on route. And that is not including whoever's at the dam.'

'Well then,' Aurelius replied, 'What are we still doing here?'

* * *

The vanguard detachment split at the narrow road leading into the colony. A segment of the squad, consisting of Castor, Titus and Octavius, along with Decius' Omen, broke off toward Jackson, with orders to assist the Master of Ordnance in stopping the laden truck. The rest of the team headed onward to the dam, where the emergency transmission beacon had soared into the sky. Hopefully, someone was still alive.

The Battlemaster signaled the squad forward, up the road, as Caius and Lucius covered the next segment of the road. Once they'd moved forward to another concealable site, they signaled the next pair forward, leapfrogging their way up to the dam.

Up ahead, gunfire rattled about the dam, but Aurelius couldn't throw caution to the winds. Though he didn't like it, it was a fact that his men's lives mattered more than a few civilians, with only a few hundred of them still alive.

No more could die in vain.

There were three of them; uniformed militia, holding military grade weaponry, around the corner on the walkways above the dam, with corpses at their feet.

That was enough to seal their fate, as the Guard barged out of the first empty building, mowing down the assailants in a short fury of silent hellfire fire. Two men flew back against the wall as the brutal rounds, and the sub munitions within them, shredded them where they stood, whilst the last slumped to the side, the right half of his head gone.

Gunfire rattled the hallways up ahead, as the defenders of Jackson tried desperately to turn the tide against their uniformed enemies. But equipment was beginning to sway the battle ahead into the Fireflies' favour.

A brutal, silent charge by the 23rd quickly inverted that unbalance, as the Fireflies suddenly found themselves between two forces, and in close quarters with veterans of a dozen Purges.

Aurelius collapsed in one man's skull with a solid fist, before sending another over the railing, into the water below, with most of his limbs broken. At his right side, Leandros was a blur of motion, striking down any that approached him as he advanced, whist at his left, Caius littered the battlefield with headless corpses with accurately placed hellfires.

The entire encounter lasted less than a minute, but it was more than enough time for a systematic slaughter on the Guard's part.

'You don't think they're throwing an awful lot of effort into gutting an isolated town?' the Blademaster inquired, as he retrieved a thrown blade from a Firefly's neck.

'Agreed,' Caius put in, 'Plus the men Leandros counted on the net, there's at least a detachment here in terms of numbers. And we number just eleven.'

Aurelius had to agree. With nearly a hundred bodies, either dead or in current combat with the Guard, and even more on the way, it seemed just too much to be dedicated to wiping a peaceful settlement off the face of the Earth. The only instance the Guard were ever given authorization for such zealous actions was on a Purge, and nothing more. There had to be some high stakes driving the determination behind the attack, and until then, the Guard were fighting blind; being forced to react rather than seizing the initiative. As a familiar face leapt over the makeshift barricades to greet tehm though, Aurelius saw his chance to get an answer.

'God,' Tommy breathed, as he offered a hand, 'I thought you'd really screwed us over with the flare. Guess not, huh?'

It took a few moments for Aurelius to realize the message behind the comment there, before he remembered the coloured markers humanity had used throughout the old wars. Of course; they could be seen by both sides, hence the Guard's use of high frequency electromagnetic signatures that could be detected easily by their constant helmets. He ignored the outstretched greeting though; in all likelihood, the man wouldn't be thanking him for a crushed hand anytime soon.

'What did you do to piss this lot off?' he asked. The open hand dropped.

'Like hell if I know,' came the reply, 'they just burst out and started firing. Town and dam were both hit simultaneously, and we've been cut off ever since.'

'I don't want a status report,' the Battlemaster groaned, 'I want a reason. Seems a bit much to send over a hundred men into burning down a town and wall, doesn't it?' Piss off the locals?'

Again, Tommy nodded his head. But it was in acknowledgment to the first statement, and by the second one, he'd promptly ended the action.

'We haven't had any trouble with the bandits in the area for a long while,' he told the Guardsmen, 'not since Joel led a party out and torched their camp several months ago. And besides; not sure if you noticed, but these guys are Fireflies. Haven't seen them around here in a long time.'

He gestured toward a fallen corpse for effect. and the green armband across it's shoulder.

'Oh,' that was all Aurelius could manage, as he recalled the Behemoth crash site again. Evidently, someone had put two and two together, and come up with five, thinking the town of Jackson was responsible for the brutal massacre of the fifteen man team that had taken down the Guard transport, and thus prompting them to attempt to put the place to the grindstone.

Still though, he reasoned, there were far too many here to just be dedicated to a revenge strike. If a team went missing, standard protocol would call for another team; double the original team's size? Certainly not this many. There had to be something else, and turning about, too late to stop Leandros drive a blade through a wounded survivor's lower jaw, before he tore it off, he realized they'd need a more reliable source of information than the defenders. And there was no better choice for who to obtain that data.

* * *

'Give me a few moments to process your enquiry, Aurelius,' the Master of Ordnance replied in a chatty tone as he dragged the screaming human from the ruined truck, 'and I'll get you a reply ASAP.'

He snapped off the line with a thought, before he hurled the man into the nearby intact house that he'd selected as a suitable site for interrogation, though intact was a relative term, after the Guardsman's actions.

The man's startled shriek was abruptly cut off as he barreled through the window a foot or two away from the already ruined door, which now lay ajar, with a broken body jamming it's natural closure.

Dragging up one more hapless survivor, Korventhor barreled through the flimsy obstruction with his prisoner in tow, before he released his grip on the man's shirt as he swung his arm forward, resulting the Firefly leaving a polished table in splinters.

After he'd caught up with the would-be demolition team and initiated a one Guardsman slaughter of the unsuspecting militiamen, Korventhor had intercepted Aurelius' need for information and with nothing but the sheer mental restraint of a Master of Ordnance, he'd avoided caving in the skulls of three Fireflies, all of whom now sat before him, with the exception of the man who was trapped in the empty window frame. Dragging the howling idiot to the ground, the Guardsman ran his eyes over the sources he had available to answer Aurelius' questions. As his previous posting as Master of the Purge, where one's duty was to milk information from subjects, be it on the field or in the bowels of the _Armageddon_, he'd spent long enough assessing who would yield their secrets in a hurry, particularly with the right approach. Time was always the problem, he contemplated momentarily. The man that lay in the ruins of the table was no stranger to the world; scarred and grizzled, he was certainly a veteran to war, and probably in charge of this rag tag team. Meanwhile, the woman that he'd clobbered on the way in still lay dazed across the floor, though when she'd still been standing, she'd displayed some experienced strength behind her blows, though they'd done minimal damage to the Guardsman. Both would guard their secrets to the grave, or at least to a point of pain Korventhor had no time to administer. But the last one though; little more than a newborn. Terror in his eyes at the sight of the armored figure.

_Perfect._

* * *

'Lets get this straight,' he opened up, in a remarkably calm, near chatty tone, to his victims, 'I'll ask questions, and I get answers. Anything less...' he ran his index finger across his throat to finish iterating the statement. The three humans shared nervous glances, and Korventhor could see the implied messages there. He knew they all had what he wanted; it was just a matter of whether they'd yield it before the fun began.

Though the young man quivered, Korventhor was silently satisfied that he eventually elected to maintain his silence. It wasn't often he had time to return the suffering humanity had delivered to his brothers and sisters.

'Fine then,' he hissed, before he shot his arm out, seizing the senior of the group by the throat, 'you first.'

Before the others could even register what had happened, Korventhor had dragged the officer over to the kitchen area without much concern, resulting in the man's right arm to become tangled in the ruined furniture. The Guardsman didn't stop, and the man hollered in pain as bone broke in the careless act, until he was thrown, face first, into an open oven. Holding his victim by the neck, the Guardsman wrenched the Firefly into place, until he was kneeling down, like a petty criminal bowing before his executioner; the open oven door serving as the block on which his neck was placed.

'Why are you out here?' Korventhor demanded, and he was annoyed to find the human laugh at him through his pain.

'You planning on gassing me?' he cracked softly, through the flare of pain in his tortured hand, 'You'd be living in a real paradise to still have the luxury of gas.'

'Not exactly,' the Guardsman hissed, before he released his hold on the man. 'I told you not to give me anything but answers.'

With that, he slammed his foot upwards, into the bottom of the oven door, sending the metal plate back into its closed state, until it was jammed by bone and flesh. The door crashed back down, along with the stubborn Firefly, and his broken neck.

* * *

Turning about from the idiot's corpse, Korventhor's eyes blazed with fury at the crouching female, who'd finally recovered from her dazed state, at least enough to recover her side arm.

Moving in a blur of motion, the Guardsman smashed the revolver from her grip with the toe of his boot, shattering her wrist, and throwing the firearm up into the air.

Snatching out at the slow moving weapon, Korventhor studied it for a moment, before his face split into a savage grin once more. There were always ways to spill secrets.

Pushing the drum from the revolver, Korventhor emptied its contents out onto the floor, before he stooped down to recover two of the four short projectiles. Without looking, he slotted them back into whichever two slots he felt first, before he replaced the crude magazine once more. Then, for good measure, he flicked the gun past his outstretched hand, sending the drum spinning.

Kneeling down beside the mewling woman, Korventhor placed the barrel of the weapon to her temple, and pulled back the trigger-like system at the back of the weapon, hearing the firearm click once more, readying itself to fire.

Then he pulled the firing trigger.

The hollow clack of metal on metal told him he'd selected an empty chamber, just as it told the battered Firefly, who's tear stained eyes slowed opened, only to realize the ordeal had only begun.

'That was for trying to put a bullet between my eyes.' He kept his tone low, letting the distorted voice of the helmet take over the interrogation. 'Anything else I don't like and you're losing that head of your's. Deal?'

He could see the message sink in, as she blinked the tears away from her eyes, trying to compose herself to open communications. For Korventhor though, she was only another means to fully break the weakest chain of the group. Another demonstration was in order.

'I really don't like long pauses,' he hissed, pulling the trigger once more.

By chance, the next chamber was loaded.

* * *

Rising from the corpse of his second victim, Korventhor finally faced the one he'd selected to give him the truth. Frozen in fear, he hadn't moved more than a pace away from where he'd fallen.

'You're next,' the Guardsman whispered. In that second, the still figure was alive with protests, screaming his compliance to the monster. The last demonstration must have done that, Korventhor mused. Kneeling down in front of his prisoner; far too close for the man's comfort, the Guardsman pulled back the revolver's hammer once more, though this time, he held it loosely; close to his own chest, rather than his victim's temple. After all, he had little intention of killing this one, at least for now.

'Well, you heard my question earlier,' Korventhor grinned, 'answer it.'

Stumbling over his words, the man let loose a barrage of information at such a high rate that even the Guardsman couldn't catch, and he was motioned to begin again, before the Master of Ordnance lost his temper.

'Two...two days ago,' he stuttered, 'we sent a team out here, and they never came back. We came out looking for them...'

'This many of you?' Korventhor inquired disbelievingly, though he couldn't sense any actual deceit. His doubt was merely another prompt for the man to elaborate, having been reminded of the cost of anything less than the full truth.

'No, no, no! Just a few of us, looking for Beckett's team, before we found this place.' The Firefly instantly leapt to clarify the open point, before that trigger was pulled.

'We didn't kill anyone!' he screamed, 'just did some reconnaissance from the trees before we saw the girl.'

Korventhor tilted his head in curiosity at that. His memory fed him back the images of that survivor Aurelius had questioned by the Behemoth's crash site, and how he too had mentioned a girl. With this many men out, there was no way this was just some simple feud. The Guard had missed some gravely important detail when they'd elected to kill the Firefly at the crash site in cold blood, and Korventhor would not yield their second chance to uncover the truth here.

'What girl?' he asked, though curiosity and impatience raised his voice to a roar, causing the frightened man to jump in fear, though he didn't get far in his seated position. Quickly though, he composed himself and dragged the vital information to the surface of his mind, before he joined his compatriots in death.

'The girl!' His voice was shrill with fear, but he carried on nonetheless, desperate to see another dawn. 'The immune one!'

'What?'

'She's the one in a billion-billion chance,' he spluttered, his mouth incapable of catching up with the information his mind was recalling to ensure his survival, 'the key behind the vaccine. We found her before; gave her to a pair of smugglers to get her out of Boston; away from the military. Only one made it, and then the bastard did the runner, and took her with him. Our only chance at a cure; gone! Why do you think so many of us came out here once we spotted her and called it in?'

He rambled more, but Korventhor wasn't listening. If the key to their whole search lay somewhere in the town they were fighting to save, the chance couldn't be lost.

'Which girl?' he asked the spluttering wreck, 'what's her name?'

'Ellie...'

'Thank you.'

With that, Korventhor rose to his feet, tossing the loaded pistol off to the side. As he did so, the young man's red eyes instinctively followed the movement; so much so that he didn't register Korventhor's Talons embedded in his chest until they reached his heart, and tore it out.

'Go in peace.'

Making his way over to the open door, Korventhor opened a comm link with the Battlemaster. The rules had just changed.

So engulfed was the Master of Ordnance in the recent turn of events, he didn't even notice the creak of the door behind him, nor the Firefly holding a bottle of spirits wrapped in cloth, step through the opening and light a match.

* * *

'Now he's just pissing me off,' Leandros snarled over the rain of fire. The team of four Guardsmen, and a rag tag team of combat ready humans of roughly a dozen in number, were currently positioned at both sides of the empty doorway into the dam's observation center. Though they were only facing perhaps half a dozen foes, the residents of Jackson had unthinkingly placed a heavily fortified checkpoint inside the center, with a scavenged machine gun as its centerpiece.

But, undermanned as it was when the attack began, now it was being used on it's former masters. And unburdened by ammunition constraints, since it wasn't technically their own munitions, the Fireflies inside seemed hell bent on using up every last dreg of ammunition hoarded by the people of Jackson for the past eight months.

While the Blademaster did not share Tommy's anguished connection to the wasted stockpile, he certainly minded being on the receiving end of it. As did the Battlemaster.

'Caius,' Aurelius muttered though the link, 'I think it's time get rid of these clowns. Flank them, bait them, kill them. You know the drill.'

'How do we flank them?' Tommy demanded over the blaze, 'there's only one way inside, and that path would be fuckin' suicide!'

'When you have explosives,' Aurelius grinned, 'there's never 'one' path.'

Catching the message too late, Tommy turned about to relay the message, only to be nearly deafened by the resounding explosion. In perfect timing, just centimeters behind the falling rubble around him, Caius bolted through the new opening a few feet to the left of the main door, letting loose a barrage of hellfires on the grouped Fireflies. The two pistols in his hands cracked twice each, before he rolled to the ground, in near perfect unison as the two unlucky victims of his sudden assault.

Instantly, the rain of fire switched onto the Master of Shadows, as human instincts, uncurbed and undisciplined, jolted aims to the lone, but closer threat.

The mistake proved to be the Fireflies undoing; the momentary reprieve from the constant fire giving Aurelius and Lucius a chance to drive into the room, whilst unleashing another barrage of fire, cutting down two more men, including the machine gunner.

It was all it took for the stalemate to be broken, as the humans and Leandros barged into the room in a headlong charge, whilst Caius and Aurelius drove up the flanks.

Outnumbered and facing superior forces, the two surviving Fireflies were annihilated without quarter, as their bodies were torn apart in a brutal salvo of hellfire, blade and bullet.

Even as they finished the massacre though, a new development sprung in over the comms.

'All units, this is Korventhor,' the voice intoned over the comms, 'we need to get to the fall back position now. Claudius and Remus have the highest bloody priority asset we could have imagined...'

Then, everything went wrong.

Korventhor's link suddenly roared as if it were at the heart of an inferno, before it shut off; replaced by static. And even as Aurelius tried to reconnect with the Master of Ordnance, a new column of black smoke blossomed up over Jackson in the distance.

'Aww, shit.' Aurelius waved Caius over, before he gestured violently toward the towering inferno in the distance.

'Get a hold of Octavius, Castor and Tius; I want their sorry arses on site now, and Korventhor found.'

'Already on it,' Caius replied, as he glided lightly over to the window, only for Aurelius to break it down, causing several humans to jump at the sudden breakage of glass.

'I'm headed back to recover Claudius and Remus.' he explained hastily, clipping a drop line to his tactical belt, and placing the other end on the concrete floor to drill and secure itself into place. 'Korventhor would have had his reasons,' he said.

'Then I'm coming with you,' the Blademaster announced. Aurelius didn't bother wasting his breath trying to persuade him otherwise, with Leandros having already thrown his own drop line anchor to the ground.

Together, they sailed toward the ground; two dark shapes against a grey wall.

Unfortunately for the Guard, vigilant eyes had seen the movement of their rapid descent, and their origin high above, that still crawled with life.

* * *

Not for the first time, Caius cursed the spores that were making communications unreliable to say the least. After several failed attempts to raise the three Guardsmen on route to the town, he'd finally cleared up a link, only to find they were locked in a firefight with another group of Fireflies, and that a good part of Jackson had gone up in flames, with fire fighting efforts being postponed in the midst of the battle. Korventhor's chances of survival were thinning with every moment. What's more, now Claudius and Remus had fallen off comms, making it impossible to warn the two remotely.

'Curse this world,' he breathed grimly, before he turned to assist Lucius with triage once more. In the mad fighting for the dam, Jackson's residents had also seen their fair share of wounds, though apart from some scratched plating, the Guard had emerged unscathed.

It was the act of turn that saved his life, as a sudden stab of pain gripped his right arm; not too far from where his heart would have been.

In a moment, the makeshift triage center was alive with screams, as bullets began to rain down, cutting down any who were positioned close enough to the window. Three men died in a mere ten seconds, whilst another three fell to the ground screaming from open wounds.

Throwing himself to the ground, narrowly behind a ruined desk, Caius snatched desperately at the Judgement that had fallen from his back in his awkward dive, only to see Tommy try to drag a man who's biosign had already flattened, into cover.

Grumbling at the blindness of humans, Caius tried to rise, to be stopped by a sight that chilled his blood. Lucius stood in the human's place, red liquid dripping from three sources across his back, before he dropped to the ground, his bio sign dropping to a critical state. Despite his urge to dive out; drag the wounded Guardsman into cover, he reigned the feeling back, forcing himself to focus on remaining unseen; a shadow in the dark.

In a single fluid action, the Guardsman sent an empty magazine from the ground flying into the air in a shallow arc, to the far side of the observation center, in clear sight of the hill the shots had originated from.

In the few short moments the snipers' eyes would have been instinctively drawn to the flying object, Caius rose, placing the Judgement upon the broken desk, and drawing the black cloak's cowl up over his helmet. Then, with the speed precision only a Master of the 23rd could manage, he let the rifle kick back four times, silencing a hidden marksman with every hellfire that left the Judgement.

The last position he'd seen a rifle flash had yet to resume fire again, and he turned blood shot eyes on the small knoll, only to spot the darkened figure tumble away to the other side of the hill in fear. He review the last image his helmet had snapped of the man; checkered shirt, brown hair, and khaki trousers. And of course; green armband across his rifle arm.

Searing the image into his mind, Caius lowered the rifle, knowing full well he was too late to catch the guilty marksman.

'We'll have a reckoning soon enough,' he promised himself, before he threw himself over the table, to reach Lucius' prone form.

Black blood in a widening circle about him, Lucius grabbed weakly at his own throat, and Caius promptly tore off the Guardsman's helm to see to the wound. Thankfully, most of the other humans were still taking cover, sparing them from the sight of the unmasked Guardsman.

Whilst the other two would have probably been non-lethal, the third round had passed solidly through Lucius' throat, severing the major vein their that even now leaked blood out onto the ground, as Caius tried desperately to close the wound with the med kit in his hands. But part of him knew full well his brother was already beyond his aid.

'I need a fucking doctor! Anyone?'

The call sounded desperately at his back somewhere; a human. That was enough for Caius to keep his head down, working on his brother, until a hand on his arm stopped him.

'Save...them...' the Guardsman gasped weakly.

Caius couldn't quite believe what the hell he'd just heard. The thought of saving a human over a fellow brother was beyond him; alien. But it was the bitter 'right' option. He could still save someone; just not his brother. Still though, there was one last thing he could do.

'Be at peace, brother,' he whispered softly. There wasn't much sadness in his voice; he'd committed the basic last rights of the Guard too many times already. Then, he locked the helm back over Lucius' head, as he breathed his final shallow breaths.

* * *

'Say again, we are under heavy attack!'

Ducking back down below the relative safety of the boarded window, Joel shielded his eyes from the flying splinters with a single hand, his other scrambling blindly for the fresh magazine that had dropped from his hands when the first rain of fire had hit them. There was a momentary reprieve, as the black clad figure that had just bellowed the SOS dived into the window, letting loose a barrage of the oversized munitions on their attackers as he did so, enabling Joel to make a grab for the slippery clip.

As he hear the satisfying click of ammunition entering his sidearm, the cold knot in his stomach tightened once more.

He'd seen his attackers when he'd gone downstairs with the fire axe, and the pendants they carried. And, despite no logical theory to their appearance, without knowledge of the Guard's massacre further down the valley two days past, his instincts screeched his worst fears into his mind.

That they'd never forgotten. That they were still hunting for her.

Unsteadily, he replaced the pistol in the holster at his side, before he drew up Ellie's hunting rifle. The first unexpected bombardment on the house had included several grenades; military standard, far from the improvised explosives Bill had taught him to craft nearly two years ago in Lincoln. And while they hadn't succeeded in actually entering the house, one had detonated outside the fortified window Ellie had been manning, cutting her with several shards of shrapnel, and putting her out of the fight.

A strong grip pulled him up by the underarm, filling Joel's vision with the black helmet and dulled red lenses of a Guardsman, and dragging him out of his clouded thoughts.

'We need to go right now,' the disembodied voice told him, and Joel simply nodded. He didn't quite know if it was Remus or Claudius he was talking to; the distorted voice of the helmet defeating him. Of course, there was always the unique sigil on each Guardsman's chest plate that he could have referred to, but he hadn't really gotten a proper look to compare the two before the shooting began. He'd spent that time bandaging his wounds, before contemplating on the sudden reappearance of the Fireflies. He shook off the thoughts though; he couldn't change the fact that they were here by moping about. But with the loaded rifle in his hands, perhaps he could.

Those were his last thoughts before a molotov hit the house.

The flaming bottle sailed cleanly through the breach in the house's upstairs walls, and cracked open on the floor beside the two of them; sending the room up in flames.

Joel had enough time to register the fire, before he too sailed through the air; crashing through the partially open door behind him as a result of the Guardsman's throw. He continued even after that; barreling through the banister of the shallow staircase, until he finally managed a solid grip on the edge of the stairwell, halting his uncontrolled fall.

It was only when he started to grumble a curse at the black figure, he smelt burnt flesh, and roars amongst insufferable pain. Shortly afterwards, several sickening impacts of bullets punching through flesh, before a body hit the ground.

The curse died unspoken in his throat.

Letting go of the edge, and letting himself fall to the ground below, already knowing what he'd find upstairs, Joel crawled carefully across the ground, redrawing the pistol he'd just holstered moments ago, keeping it aimed somewhat on the open door to his left as he moved prone. The rifle had fallen from his hands in the fall, and there was little chance that it had survived the inferno that had also claimed the Guardsman that had just saved his life.

Up Ahead, another body was thrown to the ground; this one with most of it's head gone, as he thundered into the wall just ahead, staining it red with his own blood before he collapsed to a heap.

With infinite care, Joel advanced about the corner as slowly as he could manage; keeping one eye riveted on the door, and the other ahead of himself as best he could. The recent victim of the battle was, while without a head, was still certainly a human male, and Joel certainly didn't want to be a mistakened target of the Guardsman responsible. If it were Ellie, she'd more than likely recognise him, but there was no way she was responsible for delivering blunt force injuries of that kind.

Just turning his head about once more to check for more Fireflies, Joel rounded the corner, before he was grabbed by the jacket and hoisted into the air, a solid fist slamming hard into his face, drawing blood. A second later, another arrested itself about his neck, nearly crushing his windpipe in the action, and he gasped for breath, before a straggled cry suddenly relieved him of the mounting pressure on his lifeline.

'Joel!'

Half a moment later, and he was dropped to the ground like a sack of potatoes. Dragging himself up and sucking in as much air as his tortured throat could manage, Joel would have probably fallen back down to the ground again, if a familiar figure hadn't stepped in to support him. His would-be killer, on the other hand, simply grunted, before it turned about, seeking for another victim to sate his bloodlust.

It wasn't much of an apology, but in his current state, Joel couldn't afford the breath to ask a proper one of the surviving Guardsman.

'Jesus,' Ellie whispered, as she tried unsuccessfully to help the wheezing man to his feet, 'are you okay?'

He failed in attempting to answer, but his spluttering cough was enough of a reply for Ellie, as she slipped an arm under his, not dissimilar to the way she'd half pulled, half dragged his near corpse out of the Colorado university, just over a year ago. He couldn't do it again, she promised herself, he couldn't die. Footsteps interrupted them as she managed to get Joel to the wall though, and she drew the battered pistol at her side, taking aim with her one good hand, her bandaged one still supporting her old man.

Her sights fell upon another man; this one armed with a rifle, that rose to her head. In a moment, they could both be dead.

That was until a blackened arm darted out, claw like appendages already outstretched for her foe's neck. There was a sickening crack, before the man toppled backwards, most of his neck gone.

'We need to go now,' the Guardsman told her, retracting the metal claw as he moved toward the pair.

'We're not leaving without him,' Ellie protested, placing herself between the cloaked figure and the man that had seen her through the hellish journey across the new USA. However, a hand on her arm stopped her.

'I can walk,' Joel managed, as he rubbed his throat, 'I'll be fine.'

'Suits me,' replied the stalwart figure, 'We just need to go is we're going to see another night fall.'

Just as Joel was about to contemplate alerting the Guardsman of his brother's demise, the figure suddenly thrust himself forward, toward the open door.

'Get back!' he cried, tearing apart the doorway in a thunder of fire as he moved, along with another unfortunate Firefly. 'Aurelius, if you read, this is Remus. Under heavy assult; assets in danger, I need some bloody support...'

His words were cut off by another blast of fire, though it was not his own. Sheltering Ellie with his own body, Joel only managed a quick glance at the falling Guardsman, before his limp body hit the floor, bleeding black blood across the wood. Then, shadows moved through the shattered passage.

Motioning for Ellie to stay silent, Joel moved as silently as he could, clinging to the shadows, only to nearly jump at a sudden outburst of fire. Far from dead, the Guardsman he'd only just identified as Remus had rolled over, unleashing a torrent of those deadly munitions on his killers in a final act of defiance. The pistol cracked perhaps three times, before a shotgun blast overcame the suppressed cracks, ending the sudden salvo.

'C'mon, Ellie,' he whispered, 'we need to go.'

That in itself was a lie. There wasn't anywhere they could go; they were surrounded by god-knows how many Fireflies hell bent on taking the house they were sheltering in, with another half dozen, by the sound of things, coming in to search the house. That, combined by the fact the pair only had their sidearms left, placed the odds solely in their enemy's favour. Their only real hope was to dodge the steps of their enemies, until Tommy or the Guardsmen could arrive. His thoughts though, were abruptly ended by a tap on his arm.

'Joel?' Ellie shuddered, an arm outstretched toward one of the many corpses that littered the doorway; namely the armband it wore across it's shoulder, 'They're Fireflies.'

Oh shit.

* * *

'Why would they do this?' she asked him, although she quickly saw the stupidity of the question. How the hell would he have any idea why they'd go on a bloodthirsty rampage? The people she remembered as the Fireflies were fighting for freedom from oppression in the Quarantine zones, and trying to restore some sense of order into the world. There was no real reason why they'd gone nearly, _hunter_. Only the ones in the corridor wore the reminiscent yellow uniforms of the organization; the ones she'd picked off earlier were using near makeshift gear, nearly pried from the dead hands of their victims. The only thing that hadn't changed were the constant armbands across their forearms, though against the thick foliage that surround the house, she'd yet to have picked it out until now.

Everything refused to add up; there was no reason for them to degenerate this far into violence.

Little did she realize how wrong she was.

Joel on the other hand, felt nothing but stark terror; of the truth he knew all too well. He recalled the full details of the lie that had become somewhat well rehearsed by now, but there was a slight hesitation before his answer; the unease of telling his girl the lie once more. All he could do was pray she hadn't seen it.

'I don't know, baby girl,' he replied, although that shrug of the shoulders told him everything; she'd noticed.

He would have moved to cover his error, had another not interfered at that precise moment.

Having cleared the main living room, a lone Firefly had moved to sweep the kitchen, taking him right past the two. Before he had a moment to call for aid though, Joel was on him. Seizing him by the collar, he hammered the Firefly's head into the wall twice, before he let the surprised man fall back to the ground. Even as the man opened his mouth to cry for help, Joel stamped hard on his face, killing or knocking him out; Joel didn't care.

All that did matter was the fact someone had heard something.

Shouts of surprise and anger sounded throughout the house, and Joel cursed at his error, although he was quickly seeing a way out of this; the back door still lay unguarded. With a team already inside, there was a chance the men surrounding the place had already written off the house as taken, and moved on, leaving them with a clear road out.

Motioning for Ellie to follow him, he crept onward.

Another two feet.

Then the door swung open.

'He's her...' the Firefly didn't manage to finish his warning with a blade in his throat, but it was enough to alert everyone in the house to their position.

And to make matters worse, the outside was not abandoned as Joel had thought.

A shot crashed through the window beside them, even as another salvo from an automatic weapon tore apart the kitchen they'd just occupied. Although, with a sinking feeling, Joel felt the shots were too far off; that they were just to box them in.

They were coming for her.

* * *

Advancing down the hillside, gathered in his cloak, Aurelius flitted through the undergrowth like a wraith, until he leapt the last two meters, crushing an unsuspecting sentry with his landing. A startled grunt on his comms told him Leandros, who was some twenty meters away, had also encountered a sentry, and dealt with him accordingly.

'Pick up the pace, Leandros,' he whispered, 'they're increasing in frequency. We're getting closer. One hundred meters to target.'

He ghosted across another gap in the cover, before he locked his sights on the small house they'd left Remus and Claudius at sometime back. Apart from the dozen or so Fireflies that still sat in a loose perimeter about the house, in the treeline, there was not a soul in sight.

Which worried Aurelius, since Claudius and Remus never were ones for stealth; they fought until the bitter end.

Vengeance steeling his heart, he emerged from the browning foliage in a second, before he reached the small knot of three humans just five meters from his position. Another dozen seconds later, and each of them had hit the ground without a sound, apart from three suppressed cracks biting through the air.

But up ahead, gunfire flashed through the windows of the structure.

* * *

Ellie dove down beside Joel, replacing the spent magazine in her clip as she did so. After a quick conversation with Joel, regarding the apparent need for their capture, they'd tested the theory by gunning down the first man who'd tried to approach them on the terms of surrender. Now, despite the fact they had guns at their front and back, they held the high ground, as they fired on any who tried to approach them. But, even as he leaned his back against the wooden table he'd overturned for cover, Joel knew he was long out of options. They'd eventually run out of ammo; Ellie only had four rounds left, whilst he was down to his last two. That would be six dead Fireflies at the very most, and they had at least two dozen still out there. They could barely beat them back in close quarters.

And to make matters worse, he had a sickening feeling in his gut that Ellie was beginning to put their sudden departure from the hospital, and the Fireflies' need to capture the pair of them, together.

Then, a small sack, with with sparkling fuse attached to its' rim, landed between the two of them. Apparently, the Fireflies had grown tired of waiting for them to kill six of their men.

'Smoke!' he managed to call, before he was choking on the sudden assault on his lungs. Shortly afterwards, that was the least of his problems.

A figure grabbed at him from over the barricade, at least until he managed to free a shiv from his side, and plant the blade in the Firefly's hand. The man screamed, just before Joel hit the ground; hard, as another man tackled him the wooden floor, keeping his face pinned painfully to the ground with both his hands. Desperately, he searched about blindly with his free hands, searching for anything sharp. Somewhere to his right, Ellie screamed as others dragged her over the barrier, and in that moment, Joel snapped. He tore his hands up into his attacker's face, clawing at it, before he locked his arms about the hand's neck in a death grip.

He felt something snap, and the hands holding him down go limp.

'Let her go!' he roared, pushing the corpse off his face, and sitting up into the smoke. Everything about him was just a white mist, but he could still hear her; close, and to the point of desperation.

Joel clambered over the brutalized barrier, before he threw himself at the nearest man. But even as he hammered in the Firefly's face, he couldn't keep track of the other four or so survivors that had launched themselves at the barricade, thus he never saw the wooden board swing at his head through the smoke until it was too late.

* * *

'Just fucking shoot him!'

'Joel?' Ellie whispered, more to herself than anyone else. The smoke had finally cleared, to reveal three still bodies; two of them still donning the symbolic icons across their forearms, one still wearing a battered, dead watch.

'Joel!' She tried to move to his side, but with two men holding her down and her hands bound with strong wire, there wasn't much she could actually achieve.

'Shoot him!' The Firefly, who'd slammed the 2x4 across Joel's head, screamed. 'He fucking killed them all; Daniels, Roger,'

'You heard what Marcus wanted,' replied the man who was clearly in charge of the assault force, 'he wants this bastard alive. Gotta make him pay personally.'

There was a glint in his eye that told Ellie Joel would be in for hell soon if she didn't find a way out of this. Her hands bound behind her back, against the barricade, she slowly slipped her hands downward, reaching for the trusty switchblade that had saved her more than once. She was too late though, as the furious Firefly drew his own pistol.

'Fine, then I'll...'

He got no further, before a gunshot toppled him backwards.

'I told you I wanted this piece of shit alive,' the newcomer announced to the corpse. He was heavily donned in military fatigues, body armor covering the majority of his body, though Ellie noted it was far from the riot gear the garrison forces in the cities were equipped with. Nah, it looked more like the combat gear issued to special forces, that roamed the 'infected' sectors beyond the Quarantine zones. His actual appearance though, remained to be seen; hidden behind the blood stained gas mask that covered his face.

She stopped her efforts in observation. The switchblade was nearly free.

'Cart these two out of here,' the man ordered, before he turned his gaze on Ellie, 'watch the knife on this one.'

The switchblade was out, but it remained locked in cold hands. _How did he know?_

That was the last thought she managed before the man known only as Marcus moved behind the overturned table, and locked his arm about her neck, until darkness clouded her vision.

* * *

'Get them to the trucks,' Marcus ordered the assembled survivors, 'Separate ones, I think. I want twelve of you on security detail; the rest of you will link up with the others at the rally point and head out by foot; it'll be a long walk gentlemen. Good luck.'

With that, the man left as soon as he arrived, leaving his security detail and the three survivors of the headlong charge with the two bodies needed for transport.

Just as they began work though, the door caved in.

Aurelius tackled the closest man he could find to the ground, planting a Talon in his throat as he did so, only to then realize he was far from alone, as he registered the dozen or so men in the same room, and the fact they were all armed with automatic weapons.

The house lit up with fire, and he rolled to his feet, seeking the relative cover of the nearby wall, though one round passed cleanly through his side, spilling black blood across his armor.

He managed to get to his feet, and check the wound in the brief lull he'd found himself. It was a non-critical injury, and the enhanced coagulants in his blood were already working to knit the wound back together.

Drawing his rifle and putting the wound to the back of his mind, Aurelius darted around the corner, unleashing a salvo of fire that cut apart three men in a matter of seconds.

It was then that he realized they were the only ones still in the room.

Dropping to a crouch, he moved forward, willing himself to disappear into the shadows. Leandros was working about the house's perimeter now, silencing every one of the sentries that surrounded it. He was on his own, and the only advantage he could hold was stealth.

That, and maybe a few thousand years of combat experience over his foes.

But they were nowhere to be seen, as he reached the ruined kitchen, nor were the two humans he'd left Remus and Claudius with.

He'd known they were already dead when he'd approached the house, given the fact the Fireflies had already made it inside, but if there were any doubts, what he found in the living room cemented them.

Only stopping to pull the identification chip from Remus' helmet, and to whisper the last rights to his passed brother, Aurelius continued onward throughout the house, although movement to his right; outside, stopped him.

There; twelve of them in a loose gaggle, all of them situated around the two humans he'd pulled out of the shit some time back, although currently, one was slung over a Firefly's shoulder, and the other was being unceremoniously dragged across the ground like a corpse by two others.

Though instincts told him to open fire without a care, memory of Korventhor's final moments stopped him. The Master of Ordnance had told him an asset was in that house, and in all honesty, the only thing of any real value in the shithole were the two humans; Joel and Ellie.

That, and maybe two deceased brothers.

It might have also explained the resources gone to capturing the two in the first place, Aurelius thought, as he ghosted out of the house, into the long wheat and grass that surrounded the abandoned home.

He got twenty paces before the comms, and the woods before him, exploded into gunfire.

'Aurelius,' Leandros piped in, 'you better watch out; they got a fucking machine gun here on a truck. Trying to get around it.'

Vehicles too? There were some high stakes here, Aurelius knew, just before he rose from the grass, rifle raised, intent on stopping the convoy of people before they made good on their escape.

The hellfire rifle cracked nine times, dropping the escorts before they could even react. Discarding the spent rifle to the side, the Battlemaster drew his pistol and walked on the survivors, who, with their arms occupied, were in no real position to stop him.

'Drop the two of them,' he called calmly, 'and step back. Now.'

He didn't bother asking them to drop their weapons; they were already tucked into holsters. The last time he'd made that error, it had only given the enemy a chance to actually draw the weapons on his head.

There was a moment's hesitation, before they dropped their loads, then instantly dived off the sides, trying to draw their firearms.

Aurelius put them down without mercy; dropping the two on the right, before the searched for the last one in the high grass. Movement drew his eye, and he was just about to let a round off, when the roar of an engine jerked his sights.

There, in the open road, a truck had just rolled up. A truck with a battered, but still fully functional, machine gun mounted on it's roof.

'Well, prick a nut...' he threw the sights over the gunner, desperate to get off the first shot against the damnable Firefly at the turret's back. But, too late by a half second, the last thing he saw was the brilliant flash of a dozen rounds fired in rapid succession, before pain erupted in his chest, and he toppled to the side in the grass.


	11. Hunting Vengeance

_You can rest when you're dead, Guardsman; back into the fray!  
Battlemaster Maximilium Corinthus, rallying the 23rd on Excelon Primaris._

Bright fluorescent lights flooded his vision, and he jerked awake, though he quickly sensed there was no immediate danger. Resting back down at the sight of Caius calmly toying about with a spent stimulant, Aurelius tried his level best to try to ignore the searing pain in his side and chest, before he failed quite miserably at the effort.

'I keep telling you,' the Master of Shadows told him, rising from his seated position, 'you ain't wearing an Iron Guard's armor; you ain't going to stop a tank shot by headbutting the damn thing.'

'Sorry it slipped my mind,' the Battlemaster replied, pulling a hand up to shield his eyes, until Caius switched them off with a flick of a switch, plunging them back into the relative comfort of the dark, 'how long have I been out?'

'Just a few hours,' Caius answered, fishing out a final simulant from the kit at his side, 'battle's over.'

'Did we get them? The two humans; the ones...'

'You nearly killed yourself trying to recover, I know,' Caius finished, before he shook his head in disappointment; not in his Battlemaster, but in himself.

'They got away with the assets,' he told Aurelius, 'didn't have a shot. Best hope now is that Decius can find them.'

With no options remaining, Caius had managed to get a single transmission through to the Raven in the nick of time, ordering him to track the fleeing transports, to the end of the world if need be, and Aurelius had to accept the turn of events with as much grace as he could. There wasn't much else he could have asked of his men.. Still though, the hardest news still remained to be told.

'Remus, Claudius and Lucius are gone,' he put out simply. Aurelius only nodded in quiet silence at that. For each Guardsman that fell now, there would be none other to stand in the space they left behind on the battle line, and he let out a suppressed curse at those that had taken their lives. They'd have a reckoning soon, he knew, once the Raven returned, and they could give chase to their foes.

'Korventhor?'

'Right here,' a voice almost native to a growling beast put in, and the Master of Ordnance stepped into the room. Although he hadn't known it, Korventhor had, despite the protests of the lead Firefly he'd interrogated, picked one of the few houses in Jackson with a working gas line, which had been inadvertently triggered by the brutal impact of the man's corpse hitting the control set of the oven. The result of the leaking gas, and the bumbling molotov wielding soldier at the Guardsman's rear, had all but flattened the house, nearly ending the Guardsman's life in the process, and leaving him with the wounds to match.

'Give me some good news at least,' the Battlemaster asked painfully, as Caius dropped down beside his bed to administer the stimulant in his hands, 'what did you get?'

'It ain't good news,' came the reply, 'with the subject gone.'

'How bad could it be?' At that, the red lenses of Korventhor's helmet pierced Aurelius' eyes, telling him the answer would only be amplified by those words.

'How about, 'immune, and no longer in our hands', bad?'

* * *

The world was mainly just a blur to her, as two sets of hands dragged her from the vague seating posture she'd been forced to adopt for the last couple of hours.

Only managing to contemplate that going for her confiscated switchblade probably hadn't been the best move with six armed men in the same confined space as her, Ellie felt another shot of pain from the bloody bruise across her forehead, where a rifle's butt had contacted with flesh and bone. Spitting out a half cogent curse at her captors, she was thrown down onto a hard mattress, before she heard handcuffs being rattled. Memory of another town, an old, fat fuck, and his handcuffs came back. There'd be no escaping this time, she knew, if those shackles locked in place.

Time to take a chance.

Slipping her right hand out, under the arm that was holding the limb down, Ellie rammed her fingers into the Firefly's face, not really caring if she found her mark or not.

Judging from the way her fingers hit something soft and watery, plus the way he screamed and instinctively released her other arm, she had.

Pushing herself upright on the gurney, she caught sight of the other man who'd been holding down her legs, and the commotion going on behind him.

She wasn't quite sure if she'd heard right, but Ellie could have sworn she heard, amongst the curses, insults and calls for an execution, Joel in pain and danger.

Discarding any caution she hadn't already thrown into the winds, she kicked out furiously at the last man, before, in a desperate bid to escape, she threw all of her weight onto one side of the portable bed, toppling herself onto the hard ground, but more importantly, wrenching his grasp from her legs.

Her hands scrambled about for something to use as a weapon, before a quick glance at the commotion stopped her.

There, at the center of it all, lay a still body, with a broken watch still strapped to his wrist.

'Joel!' She cried, tears blurring her vision once more. Then, without much warning, an arm clamped around her neck once more, and her vision darkened into blackness.

* * *

Favouring his right side as he moved, Aurelius still attempted to maintain a stiff march, at least in sight of any humans. Though the armor helped him conceal the most of his limp, he couldn't afford any weakness now, lest to lose him any chances of getting some answers.

With Leandros half wrenching the door ahead off it's already damaged hinges, Aurelius made his way into the mauled command room above the dam, where Lucius had joined the Fallen.

At their abrupt entry, most of the humans turned about violently to the sound, before they realized the Guard were fully armed to the teeth, though thankfully, their weapons weren't being brandished in a threatening manner, yet.

'Give us a moment,' Aurelius grunted to the uneasy workers, his own eyes behind the red lenses fixing themselves on the blonde haired man he'd identified earlier as a member of the community's inner circle. The glare alone was enough to stall his target's movements, and segregating him from the order he'd given to the rest of the center's occupants. To partly ease matters though, he waved a hand in a predetermined signal, before Leandros and Caius broke away from the room, sealing the doors behind them, leaving the Battlemaster and the Master of Ordnance alone with the man Aurelius knew offered answers.

'You're Joel's brother, aren't you?' he opened up. There was no surprise on the human's part; no suspicions as to how the information was obtained, nor any hint that the accusation was incorrect.

Perhaps not all of the Storm's whisperings were lies after all, he thought, although the human's response gave him little time to dwell on the topic.

'What's it to you?' he asked calmly, though Aurelius knew full well of the firearm the human was keeping concealed in the desk at his side, and prompted by the man's fiddling with the drawer's knob, he leapt to his own questions, before everything went to hell.

Although, to think of it, there was a reason he'd sent Caius in here earlier to find hidden threats, and disarm them. If things really did go apeshit, the human would find only an empty cartridge, and possess only a flimsy table as a line of defense against two of the 23rd's veterans.

Ideally though, they'd leave here without tossing the man out the window.

'I need answers,' Aurelius rumbled emotionlessly, 'why did they take them alive?'

'Come again?' There was genuine confusion there; it certainly wasn't an attempt to buy for time to construct a story. Obviously, in it's battered state, Jackson hadn't exactly had time for a complete register of who was still alive, or at least present.

'They took your brother, and his girl,' Korventhor put in, wiping the confusion off Tommy's face, 'Why alive? What are they to the Fireflies?'

They got no immediate answer, as Tommy sank down to the seat at his back, his hand in an open hand, trying to think whilst coping with his sudden loss. As far as he could see, he had a snowball's chance in hell at seeing his brother again. True, the man had done some hellish deeds, but, he was indeed the only family he had left. But, perhaps a desperate sense of hope spurring him to action, he gathered together his thoughts, to arm the Guard with whatever they needed to, he hoped at least, bring his family back.

'She's immune,' he put simply. 'She's the real chance at creating a cure. That's why they want her...'

'We know,' Korventhor cut in sharply, 'which is why I could be asking why you aren't trying to attempt that currently, but why Joel? He ain't immune too is he? Or did he piss them off enough for them to come here with a lynch mob armed with military hardware?'

The last sarcastic question was harsh enough for Tommy to realize that the Guard already knew far more than he'd assumed on the matter. Of course, he'd known his brother for over forty years. And even though he wasn't blessed with the Storm, he could tell a lie.

It had taken a long week of late nights chipping away at Joel's elaborate deception, but he'd uncovered the truth eventually. At first, he couldn't quite believe how selfish the act had been, and he'd nearly screamed it out to the entire town, before he'd been given the reasonings behind the savage massacre. That stopped him, though reason took some time to reach him. If that had been Maria, he had to admit to himself he'd have done the same. In the end, the two had kept it between them, and them alone.

Until now.

Although loyalty stopped words for a moment, reasoning told him otherwise. The Guard already knew full well of Joel's crimes, at least to his assumptions, and their unsympathetic tones told him they'd only heard half the story.

In the end, the only means to save his brother would be to betray his confidence.

'Joel...' Tommy dragged out the phrase, before an impatient gesture from the Master of Ordnance brought him back up to a standard conversation's pace, 'was given a job by Marlene sometime back, to get Ellie out of Boston, to the Fireflies.'

'She was the head of the Fireflies,' he quickly elaborated, noting the slight quizzical shift of Aurleius' helmet. 'Anyway...'

'They got the Fireflies, and then he took off with Ellie.' Korventhor interrupted again, 'Before they could create a cure. Why? Got attached?'

'No!' Tommy replied instinctively, before his brain caught up with him again. Technically, if Joel hadn't been attached, Ellie's head wouldn't be functioning properly anymore. 'Well, yes. But they were going to kill her to extract the parasite; it grows all over the damn brain! You can't cut all that out without killing the person...'

'And he couldn't cope with it,' Aurelius finished, nodding in acknowledgment to the tale.

'She was like a daughter to him,' Tommy put in defensively, 'He couldn't lose another.'

'I never said I wouldn't have done what he did,' the Battlemaster replied, before he sank back into his own memories. 'As a matter of fact, I already tried.'

Yes, he recalled, in the burning ruins of Ajax Temptemptus; Capital of Lementus III, he defied orders to rescue those he held most dear to him, leaving a contingent of civilians who should have had a greater chance of survival to die. But unlike Joel, he made his own choice, and still failed.

* * *

'...dead...dead...bloody dead.'

Caius lowed the scope of the Judgement, surveying his results with a satisfying gaze. The three corpses he'd pinned to solid tree trunks at varying ranges from his post now lay slumped to their sides, minus their heads. Spinning the last blade of his belt in his hand, he turned about the man he'd hunted down through the woods for over an hour, before he'd dragged his unconscious body back to the most secluded part of Jackson. Now, after a terrifying display of marksmanship, he turned on his only living victim.

'I said we'd have a reckoning.'

The sniper simply spat in his face. The Guardsman responded by bringing the sharpened blade down on the Firefly's kneecap. Setting his helmet's audio receivers to block out the screaming, he retracted the bloody instrument, before he brought it down again, this time along the entire length of the serrated edge.

Then, he began tearing the hilt back and forth, ignoring the cries for mercy, until the limb was removed.

'Now let's start,' he hissed, seating himself down beside his weakening captive, 'where were your friends headed? And hurry up; you haven't got long.'

The man took a panicked glance at the stump of his leg, which even now was pumping blood away into a growing pool at his feet. Even though it was only a few moments of hesitation, it was long enough for Caius to decide to ram the gore-stricken blade into the man's other leg.

'HURRY UP!' he roared through the helmet, 'and I'll ease your passing.'. He dragged the blade deeper through the man's thigh, eliciting another draw out scream. Perhaps it was the prospect of a quick death over a slow one that prompted some final action.

'Salt Lake City!' the sniper screamed at the top of his tortured lungs, 'St Mary's hospital!'

Caius stopped his dragging blade at that, before he gazed over Lucius' killer with blood red eyes.

'Please...' he whispered hoarsely, and in that, Caius knew the truth had been told.

'And you had my word. Be at peace.'

A second later, he wrenched the blade from torn flesh, and slashed it across his victim's throat, sending the Firefly on to join the Fallen.

* * *

'Anything else we should know?' Aurelius asked once more, as he locked another full magazine to the magnetized belt at his waist.

'Only that you'll be going into a warzone,' Tommy replied, his gaze flickering between the armored figure, and the vast assortment of cleaned weapons that were being fitted onto his person. 'Military's already declared the area to belong to the Fireflies; it's their grounds now.'

'Thought they'd be trying harder to dislodge a band of rebels from a settlement,' the Battlemaster wondered aloud, slipping the last blade on the table into a sheath below his wrist, although Tommy shook his head at that.

'They tried already, and failed at it. Marcus Green isn't a man you can screw with.'

He'd already appraised the Guard of rumors the newcomers to the Jackson commute had brought with them, and it hadn't been the most encouraging intelligence one could find in the wake of the apocalypse. An ex-SEAL field commander, he'd been rumored to have been hit in the field during a firefight with hunters, before he disappeared from all official records, until two years after the incident, when he wound up leading Firefly attacks on government assets. It still remained to be seen what caused the sudden flip in loyalties in Green, but rumor had it he was suffering from untreated PTSD, and was now well beyond a 'stable' mental capacity. The only reason Tommy could see behind his ascent to the head of the Fireflies was his innate capabilities in field command, evidenced solely by the near systematic slaughter that had taken place throughout Jackson.

'So I take it he knows the ground?' Aurelius inquired, turned about at last to face the human. He was met with a single nod.

'He managed to hold Salt Lake with only a handful of men against a government force about a hundred men in strength, so yeah, I'd say he knows the place pretty well.'

'This hospital,' Aurelius checked, recalling the data Caius had just sent him, 'it's their main base of operations, right? All patrols operate out of it, and report back to it?'

This time, he was only met with a shrug.

'I haven't been with them for several years now, Battlemaster. I'm hardly going to know what their schedule is.'

Aurelius managed to refrain from throwing a barbed comment in response to that; he couldn't ask for any more than he'd already been given. Still though, it still put him at unease to be flying in on an assumption of the whereabouts of the main base of operations. For all he knew, they could be hitting a research base, with a fully armed reaction force in the nearby vicinity, which, if not detected and dealt with, could easily cause complications to say the least with leaving the hot spot.

Better than nothing, he guessed.

'Well then,' he piped up, drawing the cloak up to cover his head, 'We'd best get going.'

'Bring them back,' Tommy's sudden comment halted the Battlemaster where he stood, before he clarified his words. 'Can't lose my brother, Aurelius. Bring him back. Please...'

'Don't worry,' the impassive voice grunted at him from behind the helmet, 'we'll do what we do best. Then we'll get your family home.'

'What's that?' Despite already having a good feeling what the Guardsman had in mind, instincts were hard to curb. His question only drew what Tommy could only assume to be the darkly humored grin of the Guard, though once more, the infernal helmet obstructed any clear indication of the Battlemaster's feelings. In his mind's eye at least though, he could see, whatever was beneath that plating, grinning.

'Find the enemy, and kill them all.'

* * *

**To Nightrise80 and Vindictam, thank you very much for the support you guys have given me to continue this story; sorry this is a relatively short chapter; gearing up for the next couple of long ones. To fb39ca4, I understand this story hasn't included much of the familiar faces from 'Last of Us', and the coming chapters will cobble the two universes together, at least I hope, to a suitable extent.**

**Next chapter; Vengeance found, coming next weekend.**


	12. Vengeance found

_Never forget. Never forgive.  
Battlemaster Maximilium Corinthus, upon leaving Lementus III._

'Omen 17... Respond'

'Comms are getting buggered,' Decius reported, though Aurelius could plainly hear the static confirming the Raven's assessment. The two of them were hunched up in the cockpit, or rather Aurelius was, since Decius was firmly strapped into the flight seat, tuning the communication channels in an effort to finally effectively set up a reliable range on their comms, with the infernal spore layer. No matter how thin the damnable layer was, wherever they existed, the Guard returned to the stone age.

And so far, the _Foresight_'s scans had disproved any theories of an airtight pocket completely free of spores.

In effect, they'd be playing barbarians for a while.

'Alright, pull us back, Decius.'

With calm and ease, the Raven realigned his omen's powerful jets, pushing them back towards Citadel Spectre, until the signal finally cleared up.

'Spectre,' he reported, 'this is Seventeen. We're on the outskirts of Salt Lake city; dropping out of comms range now.'

'Copy that, Raven,' Forus' reply came. 'Good hunting.'

'Always is, Formus,' Decius replied, before he severed the fragile comm link. Quickly, under the steady gaze of the Battlemaster, he threw the rough map the battered dam's residents had provided them across the main navigation panel, which had, over the course of the past three days of a cordyceps-spore-filled atmosphere, degenerated into gains of white and black specks. Still though, to a critical map reader's eye, it left a lot to be decided. Charts and maps weren't a commodity in the ruins of Jackson, and their only real guide consisted of a road level sketch of downtown.

After several minutes, content with his calculations at last, and filling himself with as much trust as he could place in a human map maker, Decius put the Omen's thrusters to work, and punched the button responsible for the stealth generators. As if it were enveloped by a cloud of invisible mist, the Omen faded from sight, and glided away into the dawning night.

* * *

Rising out of the depths of unconsciousness, she blinked her eyes rapidly, as the harsh fluorescent light shone down on her from above.

'She's awake, sir,' a man's voice echoed from her side, although she was too groggy to be able to shift her head to see spot the source of the sound, just as a dark silhouette filled her vision.

'Hello, Ellie. Marcus Green.' The figure offered a hand at that statement, before he let out a short bark of laughter at his own error, since the girl's hands and feet were securely fastened to the gurney below her, and hence, she was in no state to shake hands.

'Christ, what an idiot,' he mumbled to himself, as he turned about to retrieve something at his back.

_Fuck_, thought Ellie, _another guy who speaks to himself. _She quickly tried to release herself, before quickly realizing the same situation Marcus just had a few moments ago. With four sets of handcuffs chaining her to a high bed, she wouldn't be going anywhere anytime soon.

The distinctive rattle of metallic keys being shaken about in probably the most provocative manner caught her attention though, as she craned her head about to see her freedom in the hands of the madman whose face had been covered by that brutalized mask.

There wasn't any real unique features to the Firefly's face; brown or muddied hair, she couldn't tell. Dark eyes, and a broken nose. That, and maybe the most scars she'd ever counted on a single head. If he hadn't just spoken to her in the carefree manner he had just carried, she could have sworn that he'd just been dug up from a cemetery.

She was still trying to count the number of disfigured rises in flesh, when she realized a key had just clicked into it's lock, and popped it open.

Before she could even register the fact he'd just been stupid enough to release her legs, the restraints on her hands had gone too.

'There; now, where were we...'

Green had been about to say more, although Ellie's right hand, bunched up into a fist, and aimed for his already broken nose, interrupted his sentence midway. Surprisingly though, he wasn't caught off-guard, as his hand appeared between the two, holding back her punch in a painful hold on her wrist.

'Would you give me a moment, dammit?' he asked. He wasn't furious, or if he was, he certainly didn't show it. No, Ellie though, he was just half annoyed, and half amused, that she'd just tried to tear out his eyes.

'What the fuck do you want?' She hissed at him, gritting her teeth as Marcus' thumb pressed painfully against bone. Only a predator's grin met her.

'What we've always wanted; a cure, and an end to this darkness that's been cast on all of us. Twenty-two years of suffering; it can all be ended now. And you hold the key, young lady.'

'You already tried,' Ellie spat back, pulling up her left hand to put some pressure on Green's arresting grip, and to take some off of her's, before she broke a bone. 'It failed. There's no vaccine. Not with me, nor any of the others you tried it on.'

'Is that what he told you?' Green laughed again, oblivious to the added weight on his locked hand. 'What's his name? Joe, was it? Or was it Joel? Never really was good with names. Whoever the fuck is downstairs now; just answer the damn question: what did he tell you happened when he took off with you in tow?'

'He said...' Ellie's voice trailed off. After knowing Marlene for the better part of her life, she had questioned the reliability of Joel's story for some time, knowing it was far from the woman she'd known to give up on humanity's hope. And, she had wondered why Marlene had sent her away cheerfully with an old man, without waiting for her to regain consciousness and at least tell her the brutal truth that there was no cure. Let alone forgetting to say goodbye, for that matter.

But with Salt Lake already several hours behind them, and without another ruined car in sight to siphon gas from, she'd never brought up the matter, and just tried to accept it as a truth.

Now, she could start to see a house of cards falling down. Whilst Green undoubtedly had a few screws loose, her gut painfully nagged her to listen, wanting to hear the full truth behind the events that transpired in during her 'sleep' one year ago.

'Didn't believe him?' He whispered in her ear, before he released her hand without warning. 'If you want the truth, I'll show you.'

* * *

Leandros tapped the hilt of one of his many blades impatiently against his left thigh, waiting as the Omen glided unobtrusively through the sky. Ahead of him, Titus and Octavius locked ammunition packs to their tactical belts, while Castor and Caius realigned their long rifles for the kill. Meanwhile, Korventhor sat calmly in an opposite seat, cleaning the Executioner for the battle to come.

The waiting continued.

* * *

Ellie squatted beside the wooden cross driven into the soft ground with mixed emotions to say the least. Even as the first drops of rain rattled down on her, she remained there for a long time, trying to discern everything she'd just learned.

She hadn't really needed to listen to the voice recorders of the survivors of Joel's rampage, nor registered the security footage Marcus had provided her with; she'd always doubted in her heart that the old man had sworn on the truth anyway.

But now that it was here, she hardly felt the vindication she should have received from unveiling the truth.

'Why?' she asked no one in particular. Not even the messed up Firefly commander, who sat a respectable distance away, in a small camouflaged lookout post with two escorts. None of them carried heavy armaments; they weren't expecting her to run. No one would stop her.

They'd decided to let the truth do it's painful work.

_000001_

_Marlene_

The pendent still hung on the crooked cross driven into the dirt that covered the makeshift graveyard, swinging gently in the wind, water slowly dripping from it's curved tip.

Like the blood that stained the same metal a year past.

She buried her head in her hands for a long time, trying to remember the woman she'd known as her friend, and perhaps her mother. She spent that time cursing the man who'd robbed her of not only friends, but her chance to better the world. For what?

She didn't ask herself that question further, her guilt, and hatred only registering the hollow truth she'd known to be true.

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, she dragged herself to her feet, exhausted in mind, and trudged back over to the small outpost beside the Firefly's cemetery. Every single pendant that hung from the wooden crosses had been placed by the man she'd come to know as her father, tearing the open wound at her heart all the more with every step she took to think over what she was about to do. Resolve stealing her actions though, she made her choice.

'Decided to stay?' The Firefly asked, rising from his seat, sending a guard off on some errand with a single gesture as he said the words. As the Firefly set off at a run, Ellie stopped in her tracks, considering her options once more. Neither Marcus, nor the remaining guard had any weapons in easy reach, whilst she'd actually been returned her switchblade and pistol for 'self defence' outside the secure perimeter of the hospital. She considered pulling either weapon and ending the two bastards that sat before her in an instant, vindicating everyone they'd killed in dragging her out here, and taking on the hospital to find Joel.

To kill him herself.

But the cost would be too great, and once again; what the hell would it be for? The short high of vengeance, before she realized she'd destroyed any chance of redeeming humanity.

The switchblade stayed sheathed.

Without a word uttered, she strode past them, back toward the hospital.

'Good choice,' Marcus muttered once more, all the more to himself rather than the conflicted girl. Signalling his remaining escort to follow her, Green sighed to himself as he reached for the radio at his side. Perhaps it nearly was over. All that remained was the final hurdle, and he'd be damned if anything threw a wrench in their efforts once more.

'Nix,' Green spoke to the operator on the far end, 'run the perimeter checks one last time. We're nearing the end of this bloody journey. Can't have anything going wrong now.'

* * *

'Command to outpost twelve, come in; Stevens, do you read?'

'Nope, we certainly don't,' Leandros whispered, as he drove a sharpened dagger into the radio's receiver, and listened in satisfaction as the sound of the human on the other end degenerated into white noise.

Only stopping to ensure the corpse at his feet was, without a shred of doubt, dead, Leandros tossed aside the bloody pieces of human biology he'd retrieved from the man's chest, before he made his way back upstairs to the Omen and the rest of the vanguard.

Being the first evidence of human habitation they'd encountered since entering Salt Lake City, the vanguard had touched down and torn the place down, in search of any signs that would point to the party of guilty Fireflies that had fled with their assets. The green insignias worn by the residents of the outpost had proven enough for a silent massacre of suppressed hellfire rounds, before Talons and blades had finished the task.

Although, he thought with a grim smile, there was one more step to be taken before the rooftop outpost was completely clear of all human life.

'How long do you want to bet?' he muttered to Caius over the comms, as Korventhor dragged a half conscious, gagged survivor inside the black craft. Caius gave him a mocking glance in return.

'From now, or when the screaming starts?'

'Thirty seconds,' Leandros said, nodding to the other Guardsman's final statement, 'says a bottle of grog when we get back to Terra.'

'One minute,' countered the Master of Shadows. Whilst he lacked the instinctive hatred for humanity, like most of his fellow Guardsmen, he'd seen enough to validate the death of any of the green banded milita.

If that meant a gruesome one at Korventhor's hands, and it netted him another bottle when he got back, then so much the better.

Just then, the screaming started.

* * *

'You've got to be screwing with me,' Korventhor scoffed lightly, as he finished pinning the man to the empty armement table with a final blade through the palm of his hand, 'I ain't even started yet.'

The man spat curses, but no information. Pity.

'Well, I don't have much time, so I'll be quick.'

Then, unexpectedly, in such a careless manner that even made Aurelius flinch, he dragged one bloody blade from the man's boot, and brought it back down, only; far higher up, between the man's legs.

There were screams and howls of agony, but once more, to the Master of Ordnance's disappointment, no relevant information on the whereabouts of the two assets the Fireflies had torn from the dead hands of two battle brothers. So, with as little finess as he could muster, he began to drag the serrated blade down, tearing through the man's groin and, more sensitive regions. Throughout the procedure, more crude curses flew from the Firefly's mouth at the same rate the Guardsman's Executioner cannon would have spat death.

'Go to...' he began, before the blade's work cut him off again, into barely cognent curses. 'Fuck!

'Don't think you're going to be able to do that again once I'm done with you, lad,' Korventhor grinned, 'In fact, it'll be a bloody miracle if you can make your chest rise and fall once you get carted out of here. Minus your prick, of course.'

The blade began its downward dragging motion again.

'Oh my God!' The Firefly bit off the last end of his sudden screech as the pain reached his brain, and he began thrashing about again, although in his pinned state, it only tore his bloody hands further.

'I don't think he's listening to you mate,' Korventhor mocked him again, 'spill your guts, and I'll make sure you meet him soon. If not, then once your manhood's gone, I just have to literally spill your insides.'

'She's on top floor!' his captive burst out abruptly through the pain, 'I don't know where but she's on top fucking floor! Please...'

'And him?' At the first sign of compliance, the Guardsman had ended his savage work, giving the dead man some time to catch his breath.

'Basement; that's all I know. Please...let me...'

'Don't worry, I believe you.'

With that, the Master of Ordnance tore the bloody blade from the Firefly, only to replant it back in the man's forehead; driving it downward until he felt the blade hit the solid metal table beneath the now still body.

* * *

He could still remember the spot; just a couple of meters to the right of the lift, where she'd died. At his hands, Marlene, so-called 'Queen' of the Fireflies, had died. In the same car park, in the same spot he now hung painfully from the ceiling.

Joel wearily managed to crane his head to face his captors; about half a dozen of the men and women that had called those, whom he'd killed during his battle to save Ellie, brothers.

He'd known somehow, the truth would have come out sometime, and that there'd be a reckoning when it happened.

He'd just figured it would be from Ellie, not the brothers of his victims.

As a man advanced toward him, Joel managed to come to a single conclusion before the crowbar hit him.

That he'd be meeting his real daughter a lot sooner than he'd expected.

* * *

'All I'll say is that you have shit reflexes.'

With that, the Blademaster turned away from a grinning Caius, who still held a battered timekeeper in his hands, with the dim outline of a forty-five-point-nine-two still stenciled into it's screen.

'I thought you never were good at bets,' Aurelius callously joked, even as the Master of Ordnance strode out from the darkened holds of the Omen, leaving a grumbling Raven with his mess.

'There's always a first for everything.' The Guardsman replied, raising a hand to face the looming hospital across the road far below them, 'Even in recovering an asset from humanity intact.'

'That might be an issue,' the Battlemaster returned carefully, rubbing the bottom edge of his helm, the obstruction preventing any contact with his half metallic chin, 'I'm trusting you to keep him on a leash, Caius. Can't go wrong here.'

No one needed any explanation of who he was referring to. With a Blademaster hell bent on gutting the closest human in range of his many sharpened blades, Aurelius had designated the Guardsman in question to the recovery of the secondary asset in the basement, unwilling to let the blade-happy Master too near to the one they sorely needed intact. Worst came to the worst, he decided, if a friendly copped it, it would be the one of lesser value, although it would then be hell to drag the one he left behind along.

Hence, he'd trusted Caius to reel back his old friend, whilst the Battlemaster and Korventhor, with support from Castor, Titus and Octavius, homed in on the primary target.

'No worries Aurelius,' the Master of Shadows replied, 'just as long as he's got other humans to kill, he shouldn't worry too much about a lone survivor.'

Before the Battlemaster could voice any further concerns, he fired off the long hook slotted to a the small compartment above his wrist, securing a line between the deserted outpost, and the hospital.

With a casual shrug, the Guardsman locked the end of the wire to a convenient pillar, before he pulled the arrestor from his tac-belt and attached it to the wire above his head.

'I accept death as my fate,' he muttered darkly, as he stepped off the edge, into open space.

* * *

There were well over a dozen voices about her, but none of them were cogent to Ellie's ears. Only a blur haze drifted about her, as she reflected on the lie she'd never quite believed, but had decided to anyway.

_The bastard killed them all. Even her..._

It galled her to think they'd come so far, only to be torn away from her goal even after the last hurdle. To think they'd all died in vain to save her from a fate she'd never seen until now.

Now, all that she could do was to fulfil the task that should have been completed a year ago. It certainly wouldn't bring back her friend, she guessed, but it would be enough to know she'd completed her purpose.

_I'll make you proud, mom_, she swore inwardly, _I swear it._

Without warning, the gurney came to a halt, and Ellie craned her head up to see what the fuss was, though in her clouded thoughts, she really didn't care much for it. It was more of a reflex action that led her to spot the bloody Firefly's corpse slumped against the wall.

Above his still form, a red message was scrawled in blood.

_Death is fate._

She stared at the haunting words, before a familiar figure filled her vision. A dark, cloaked soldier, a crushed skull across his chest.

Before the escorts about her could register the sudden threat, the pistol in the Guardsman's outstretched hand lit the dim corridor in light and blood. Two bolts of light tore through the closest Firefly as he tried to bring his own rifle to bear.

'Get down Ellie,' Korventhor hissed across the intervening space, as he ducked into a nearby alcove, before the corridor was alive with gunfire from the weapons around her.

While she didn't knowingly follow his instructions, in the heat of the moment, her arms, which had been supporting her in her upright position, gave way, dropping her back down to the gurney's surface, moments before three hellfires passed over her in rapid succession, spraying her with slick blood.

Shakily trying to rise again, Ellie wiped a sleeve across her face in an attempt to wipe away the thick red liquid, before a force slammed into the gurney, and dragged her off the mobile table, to the hard ground.

* * *

Cloak billowing outward as he swung about, Aurelius drew up his smoking hellfire rifle on the closest surviving escorts, as he placed himself between the girl and the wavering rifles. Precision fire cut down a good number in the corridor, before a few fast thinking men threw themselves behind a counter by the large windows of the hospital, well of our range of a grenade throw, and heavily protected from hellfire fire.

Thankfully though, they'd seen the two present Guardsmen as the only threat, and were giving little attention to the window at their backs.

'Target secured!' Aurelius called into the comms, 'Bring the rain!'

A moment later, and the glass behind the Fireflies shattered, as Titus, Octavius and Castor tore through the fragile shielding, dropping from their deployed ziplines at the last possible moment, hellfire rifles already trained on the luckless survivors.

The short, sudden barrage ripped apart men in the shower of brutal munitions, before Talons leapt from wrists, and the Guard were upon the Fireflies.

Only halting to send Ellie tumbling over a cleared desk into relative cover, Aurelius sped into the fray, tossing aside his spent rifle and letting a blade fly from it's sheath into his left hand, whilst his right unleashed the claws of the Guard.

He raked the tri-bladed claw across the closest man's torso, tearing open the Firefly's chest cavity, before he pinned the honed blade into a scrambling survivor's head, ending his screams for aid.

Up ahead, the short savage battle concluded itself, as the green bands were torn from corpses in a final vengeance upon the killers of Guardsmen, and one pitiful wounded man was sent to his death by a battle-consumed Titus through the now shattered window at the squad's back.

'Area clear,' Castor called to the Battlemaster, 'moving to secure secondary levels.'

In a loose pack, the three shadows disappeared back into the powerless corridors, letting their dark cloaks veil them once more with the dark as they headed for the closest stairwell, hunting for their prey..

'Well that could have gone worse,' Aurelius decided, instantly regretting the words. The last time he'd uttered that, the 23rd had taken grievous losses within an hour of those blasted words leaving his mouth, not to mention he'd become an outcast with the following battle.

The last of the blessed and cursed.

The last Stormcaller.

Just then, a door caved in, to admit another team of Fireflies, fully armed, and seeking vengeance. One immediately screeched the Battlemaster's presence and hurled a bastardized can at the cloaked figure, before a hellfire in his chest dropped him. Aurelius briefly considered taking on the remainder of the furious squad, when he registered the fuse set on the spike-laden canister that had been aimed for his head.

Even as he dived for the desk he'd thrown the asset under a few moments ago, Serena's voice echoed in his head once more; an old memory stirring that he had no wish to remember.

_You had to open your bloody gob._

* * *

Not for the first time since regaining consciousness in the carpark, Joel spat blood into the face of his tormentor, as he continued to pay for his crimes against the Fireflies. The man growled in anger, before the crowbar hit him again. Eventually though, the relentless beating ended, only for a second man to step forward.

However, in place of the crowbar, this man wielded a revolver.

'You know,' he hissed at Joel, 'The last time you came through here you left most of my friends dead.'

'My brother was one of them.' Joel didn't exactly respond to the words though, as most of his vision consisted of vague stars. So the man replied by pulling the gun to Joel's groin.

'Now, you're going to get exactly what you gave him.' he snarled, and suddenly, Joel's vision cleared, as he recalled the man he'd killed to uncover the surgery room, where Ellie would have died. He tried to release himself from his bonds, but to no avail, knowing full well what was coming.

'You believe in an eye for an eye?' the Firefly growled at him, as he pulled the firing hammer. Joel was about to close his eyes and accept his fate, when a voice stopped everyone in the carpark. A distorted voice that was strangely familiar.

'As a matter of fact, I do.'

A solid, black boot smashed the revolver from the Firefly's grasp, shattering his hand as it did so. He screamed, only to be shut up by the muzzle of a hellfire pistol, which had landed solely against his forehead.

'This is for my brothers.'

Caius pulled the trigger.

* * *

Even as the Firefly's corpse fell back, headless, Caius drew up his aim onto the others that now threatened him and Joel. Gunfire sparked around the two, as the men panicked at the sight of the massive armored figure. Caius on the other hand, had mostly forgotten what fear felt like long ago.

Two more cracks of the hellfire pistol in his hand, and another two soldiers fell to the ground, dead or mortally wounded.

Another came at him, swinging a heavy iron club with a blade pinned to it's top end. Caius ducked under the first clumsy blow, drawing his own blade in the same movement. Then he rammed the serrated edge into the man's chest, even as he opened fire again, forcing the last two men to dive for the ground.

Only for Leandros to finish the job. The Blademaster burst from the garbage dumpsters he'd concealed himself in prior to the attack, and he drove the sharpened blades deep into the two surviving soldiers' necks, killing them instantly.

'Sorry that it took us so long,' apologized Caius, as he turned his own blade about to cut Joel down, 'had to get past a ton of them who didn't like it when we went into the off staff only sector.'

The joke fell on deaf ears though, as Joel collapsed to the ground, recovering from his ordeal. Then, he was off, retrieving his backpack, and grabbing a sidearm from one of the fallen soldiers. Caius tried to slow him down, but he was only brushed off.

'Hey, calm down,' he tried, 'you probably have a concussion; you want to like, sit down or something first?' His hand instinctively dropped to the med kit on his belt, but Joel's words saved him the effort of popping the case open.

'Thanks but no thanks,' Joel replied. He slammed a fresh magazine into the expended clip of his sidearm. 'I need to get to her.'

'Don't worry, Aurelius and Korventhor are already up there...'

'I worry.' Joel muttered. There was the satisfying click of a new magazine in a weapon, before he was off, barging through the fire escape and upwards.

'Joel! Wait a... dammit.' Caius managed, his words barely catching up with man as he took off.

'Well he's a grateful little shit, ain't he?' Leandros wondered aloud.

'He already thanked us, deaf. You've been with Korventhor too much haven't you?' Caius asked as he slanted his head to one side in enquiry. 'Finally lose your hearing to the Executioner?'

'Actually, I think you are going deaf,' replied Leandros, sliding a pair of throwing blades into his hand as he did so, 'otherwise you would have heard the two idiots with guns at your back. Thankfully for you though, I did.'

In a single fluid action, he let the blades go, each one spinning past one side of Caius' head, and planting themselves into a Firefly's body. It was only then though that the Guardsmen realized that the two unfortunates were not alone, and another squad burst in through the access lift, baying for their blood.

Caius threw himself over the bonnet of a nearby car, joined in quick succession by the Blademaster. As he drew his own rifle, Caius managed a few last words to his friend before the battle began once more.

'Show off.'

* * *

Aurelius dove under the nearby desk, dragging Ellie down with him, as the bomb went off, showing them in dust and shrapnel.

Back down the hall, men screamed and died, as Korventhor marched to confront them, unleashing controlled bursts of fire into men that shredded their bodies to bloody pieces of meat.

'Aurelius, stop!' the girl screamed at him. 'They told me what happened. What he did. They're not the guilty ones...'

'And did they tell you why he did it?' asked Aurelius, taking aim on a man who was drawing too close to his brother's side. The girl moved though, shoving his shoulder and dislodging his aim, so he was forced to look at her.

'He killed Marlene. He fucking killed her...'

'Did they care to mention they were about to tear your head out to retrieve their little cure?' asked Aurelius. He saw the revelations hit her, and used the brief reprieve to take down his target. The man slumped back, a gaping hole in his chest.

Seeing Korventhor was in no immediate danger, Aurelius turned back to Ellie. She'd sank down to the ground, lying against the metal desk for support, her eyes closed as she digested everything she'd learnt.

It wasn't everyday one learnt the ugly truth behind everything they'd believed in, and Aurelius could understand the revelations had taxed her greatly. Despite the fact there were still people firing at him, he knelt back down beside her. He trusted Korventhor to deal with it,

'Listen Ellie, I know that the past few hours have been hard on you,' he impassively whispered to her through the helmet, 'but you need something to fight for. It's the only thing that will keep you going.'

'Funny,' she scoffed, eyes still screwed shut, 'that's what he said when he swore on a lie.'

Aurelius placed a hand on her shoulder, trying to get her to snap out of it, before their lack of concentration on the ongoing battle killed the both of them.

'There'll be another time to sort things out with Joel, Ellie.' he tried. 'Just remember that he loves you. That's why he came back for you. And it may well have been the right choice...'

A blade stabbed down at the Battlemaster, though it's user moved too slow to fight the Guardsman. Aurelius grabbed the man's knife hand and pulled him over the table with it, breaking the limb in the process. The Firefly cried out, before Aurelius stamped hard on his back, paralysing him from the waist down. It was only then that he realized Ellie was gone. A Firefly now held her, blade to the neck, ready to kill her the second Aurelius tried something.

Risking a glimpse of his brother, Aurelius realized that Korventhor could be of no aid, as a fresh squad of men burst into the hallway, firing on the Guardsman and pinning him down.

He would have to do this alone.

* * *

Joel broke into the staircase, and immediately moved up at a run.

_Top floor ... Far end_

The last words of the first Firefly he'd killed during his one man war on the Fireflies echoed in his head. That would be where she was now, ready to die once more.

He'd pulled off the impossible once; he could do it again.

The door ahead of him barged open, and a man staggered outside, trying to locate the direction from which Joel's echoing footsteps were originating from.

He hadn't turned in the right direction until Joel was already onto him, planting the shiv into the Firefly's chest at a run. The blade was wrenched from his grasp by his own momentum, but it did not matter. He continued up, leaving the man to fall against the wall to die, before they could bring her any harm.

'I'll do it!' the Firefly screamed at him, 'I'll fucking do it!'

Aurelius tried to make a lunge for the man he'd just taken down, hoping that a hostage of his own might serve to diffuse the situation, but the man holding Ellie immediately placed the blade on Ellie's throat, with greater force.

'Get the fuck away from him! I'll kill her you bastard!'

Abandoning the hellfire pistol on the nearby desk, Aurelius rose from his crouched position slowly. He could plainly see his opponent did not possess a firearm - the only threat that he posed being the blade being pressed against the girl's lifeline. He was treading on thin ice here - if he pushed the man too far, he'd most likely kill their only hope at a vaccine against the damnable plague.

He wasn't entirely sure how far, to what ends, would a man go for his own survival. It was one of those qualities that made mankind, when it was on the brink of extinction, unpredictable, and thus all the more dangerous.

'You kill her, then we're all dead,' he began, edging his way closer to the Firefly. 'Put down the blade, let her go, and leave. I'm giving you a chance here. Take it. There will not be a second.'

'Screw you man,' came the reply, 'if I let her go, you're just going to put a bullet in my head. Is that it?' He crouched behind Ellie as he said the words, and applied more force to the blade, drawing a thin line of blood from the girl.

'I am no man,' Aurelius hissed, 'but I'll place a hellfire in your head soon enough if you don't let her go.'

The Firefly opened his mouth to spit at the Battlemaster again, but then he stopped, midway in drawing breath to speak. In his open mouth, a bloody blade had appeared, with perhaps something that could have been passed off as the spinal cord impaled on its tip.

His body fell to the ground, motionless, the now-harmless blade hitting to the ground with a ring of metal on hard concrete.

In his place stood Joel, blade in one hand, and a pistol in another. Two more corpses lay at his back, gunshot wounds evident on both, though amidst the savage firefight going on a few meters away, it was no surprise none of them had heard the exchange.

Released by her captor's death, Ellie fell forward, scrambling her feet to thank her savior, when her eyes found the old grizzled man who'd ended everything she'd known.

The words died in her mouth, unspoken.

* * *

'Switchback!' Caius called to the Blademaster across the corridor, 'Switchback now!'

Another two grenades unclipped themselves from the Guardsman's hand, and Caius let them fly down the corridor, filling it with coloured smoke that proceeded to play havoc once more with the Fireflies' lungs, dwindling their rate of fire down the narrow path yet again.

In an instant, the two Guardsmen sped down the passage, crossing over again onto opposite sides, disorientating the humans with the whereabouts of the marksman, and the swordsman yet again.

The mounted gun swung back and forth between the supports rapidly, seeking either of the cloaked forms. A careless flick of a wrist sent part of a black cloak billowing out into the pass, drawing the full fury of the last five Fireflies.

It was enough of a break to give Caius a chance to send an aimed fragmentation explosive down the mouth of the gunline, shredding the defenders where they stood. Any who survived were torn apart in a fury of blades, as the Blademaster vaulted over the ruined barricade, savagely tearing out the wounded gunner's innards, before he let another envenomed throwing blade leap from his gauntlets, impaling itself in the eye of the last survivor.

The pistol that had been clutched in his weakening arms fell to the ground, unfired.

'That could have gone better,' he muttered to Caius, eyeing his torn cloak with some distaste. There were no support personnel aboard the _Retributor_ fleet's ships; all maintenance and replacement of damaged weaponry was fulfilled by the Guardsmen themselves. It would be awhile at least before he could find a suitable replacement. In the meanwhile, he certainly didn't favour wandering about with a good dozen holes in his only mobile camouflage, and he slipped the Master of Shadows an annoyed glance.

'Next time, you're the decoy.'

'If you could pick up something other than a sharp object, sure,' Caius returned, a grin set between his ears. However, it was soon wiped off by the contents of the room behind the firing step they'd just taken.

'By the Great Father,' he whispered, before he nudged the Guardsman at his side.

'You'd better get Aurelius, Leandros,' Caius suggested without facing his friend, 'he's not going to like this.'

Even as the Blademaster dropped away, back into darkness, the Master of Shadows remained rooted to where he stood for a long time, until the slight clink of a foot against a cracked brick sent him hurtling around, back into the fray of battle.

It was, after all, what the Guard were built for.

* * *

**Thanks for the support once more guys. Next chapter; Ellie confronts Joel, and a new threat emerges.**

**Next chapter coming next sunday**


	13. We're all going to Hell

_Everything happens for a reason, right? Then tell me what the hell was the reason for this.  
Last transmission from Field master Nius after encountering new xeno subspecies, now classified as 'Bio-Titan', during the Battle of Braxen IV._

'What the hell happened, Joel?'

The question rang throughout the empty halls, stinging his ears as he registered the words.

_She knew._

In that moment, Joel felt his entire life; everything he'd built up with the girl he'd grown to care for, come crashing down into a pile of dust. He knew there would be no recovering from this, and his mouth struggled to find any response that wouldn't damn him further.

'Fuck it,' Ellie spat, 'just tell me; fucking why? After everything we went through?'

'They...' Joel muttered, trying to think, 'were going to kill you. To find a cure. I couldn't...'

'Yeah,' finished Ellie, bitterly, 'let some good come from all the shit we went through to come out here.'

Joel was taken aback by the words, before he tried once more, desperately searching for any grip on the lifeline that was slipping through his fingers.

'Do you value your life?' He demanded desperately, 'After everything? They weren't even going to give you a choice...'

'And so you made it for me? And killed them all while you were at it?'

Agast, she turned away, hatred, confusion and regret all etched across her form. It took Joel several moments to realize, through the haze of memories that were flashing before his eyes, that she'd placed a good few meters between the two of them, and he stumbled after her.

'Ellie,' he whispered, 'I'm sorry...'

'It's too late Joel.' She replied, at the same volume, though it cut through the older man all the same. 'It's fucking over.'

The door separating the pair slammed shut, and Joel fell back into a chair he hadn't noticed prior to his legs collapsing on him. The tears broke through, and he buried his head in his hands.

He'd lost her. Again.

Now, he truly was alone.

* * *

Aurelius watched on with some misgivings that he knew shouldn't have existed. Despite every sin of man's forefathers, he couldn't help but feel some conflicted sympathy for both sides.

What the hell he would have done in that situation, he did not know, and he prayed to the Great Father he'd never be forced on such a similar trial.

Where would one's loyalties lie?

In the Greater Good, or in the brothers at one's side at the heart of a battle?

Thankfully, the echoes of several footsteps at his back spared him of any further deep thoughts, and he snapped around, drawing the hellfire pistol on the open stairwell Joel had thundered up some time back, to face his worst fears.

'Friendly,' a disembodied voice sounded. That was enough for Aurelius to drop the pistol back to his hip, though it remained gripped in his armored hands. There hadn't really been any means to completely purge the hospital, with so few Guardsmen and such a large area to cover. It remained a fair guess that survivors of the brutal assault still roamed the corridors, though perhaps not as confidently as they had done so half an hour ago. Hence, every other Guardsman, with the exception of Aurelius and Korventhor, was somewhere on picket duty, guarding the primary access points to the upper levels.  
Or, in Caius and Leandros' case, going on the offensive against the last remnants of organized resistance.

So it was quite a surprise to find the Blademaster's armored figure nearly six stories above his last reported position.

'Caius wants you,' Leandros reported, 'says it's urgent.'

Aurelius only grunted an acknowledgement, before he risked one more glance at the two isolated humans. Physically, only a single dividing wall separated them, but one didn't need the Storm to know there was far more between them than a crumbling example of masonry.

'I miss something?' the Blademaster asked without a trace of concern. Aurelius just shook his head in reply. If any one was in search for a human sympathizer, they'd be sorely disappointed in the Blademaster of the 23rd.

'Keep an eye on things up here,' he muttered, 'I'm on the way down.'

* * *

The hallways, once more decorated with corpses marked with still fireflies, made no sound to betray his presence as he moved on, silently, to avoid the last of the enemy. After Leandros' quick account of the pair's brutal massacre on the lower floors though, the Battlemaster wasn't even sure if there were anymore left, with the majority of his sensors useless. Now, only what the Great Father had gifted him at birth, and the stalwart replacement augmentics Caius had manufactured to replace that which had been lost, remained.

An empty hammock creaked softly against it's supports, having just recently been emptied.

Aurelius stopped moving in an instant, and drew the rifle from his back. Up ahead; the door lay ajar, and a careless shadow stood behind it; the low hanging moonlight announcing it's existence.

Hellfire crackled throughout the hospital twice, though not as loudly as the Firefly's drawn out scream, as he was plucked from the ground by the black specter, and tossed through the convenient window at his back.

Moving down the lift shaft, using the thick cables that suspended the iron boxes as drop lines, Aurelius entered the basement . A number of corpses lay strewn across the ground from Caius' last battle, and blood still lay splattered against the wall, where it had flown from the ex-smuggler's mouth during his beating.

Up ahead, he could hear a distorted voice, and the screaming of a man quickly degenerating into a gurgle of blood.

Sliding the next door open, he came face to face with the short barrel of a hellfire pistol.

'Oh, it's you,' Caius muttered, lowering the pistol as he recognized the immense build of the Battlemaster, at least in comparison to the last man who'd tried to gain access to the lower labs.

'What is it Caius?' Aurelius asked, 'we're short on time, and I'm guessing we don't have a lot of time before the Infected turn up.' From the amount of gunfire that had shaken the structure, Aurelius wasn't surprised that Castor and Titus had already made contact with several separate hordes of infected, though their numbers were of only minimal threat.

So far, the pair had succeeded in drawing the hordes off; away from the hospital, although the timeframe the team had before another clicking human barged through the front doors remained to be seen.

The Master of Shadows, though, seemed to have little thought for the pressing threat at the gates, and instead opted to guide the Battlemaster to the last room he and the Blademaster had cleared in their assault.

'Things,' he managed, gesturing vaguely to the open doors ahead, 'just got worse.'

* * *

'Alright, I give up,' Aurelius scoffed, turning to the seated Guardsman at his side, 'What is it?'

'A mutation,' came the dark reply, 'another strain of the parasite. Only, a lot worse.'

The figure in question stood behind a metal case that should have been buried underground as part of a bomb shelter, with only a thick glass window at eye-level giving any kind of observation on the creature. Above it, reinforced vents provided ventilation, but little else penetrated the thick casing. But apart from the maximum security, there was nothing of any real value in the actual subject.

As for that matter, Aurelius decided, the human looked suitably normal, compared to some of the twisted parodies of 'life' the Cordyceps outbreak had thrown at them so far. A partly torn jacket, a long shirt, and some loose fitting trousers didn't give much of a dangerous appearance to the young man. No fungal matter grew from the human; not even a trace in the regions it should have been most prominent, as he gazed back at the Battlemaster through clear eyes.

'Looks pretty normal to me,' Aurelius hazarded, although something in the Storm told him he couldn't have been further from the truth.

His suspicions were quickly proven to be, as the figure suddenly slammed it's head against the glass, displaying the full decay of dentistry and flesh hidden behind it's jaws. Fungal matter seemed to glisten within it's twisted matter, and Aurelius found himself momentarily theorizing the means by which the creature was not choking to death on the growths in it's oral cavity.

'Great Father,' he hissed, instinctively drawing back upon the individual's violent assault. 'Alright, I get the picture, now can you give me some explanation of what the hell I'm looking at?'

'Patient name; Daniel,' Caius muttered under his breath, as he scanned through several scattered documents aloud, 'diagnosed with...'

'Cut the medical shit, if you don't mind Caius,' Aurelius put in, 'Can you summarize it in a form a layman like me would understand?'

The Guardsman opened and closed his mouth several times like a suffocating fish out of water, before he thought through the question rationally, and quickly came to a conclusion his Battlemaster certainly wasn't going to enjoy. The only way he'd get the fascinating, if not terrifying discovery across would be if he could convey the data faster than Aurelius could interrupt him.

'New subspecies of the Cordyceps outbreak,' he read off the screen, his eyes sifting through items of use in the text, and medical notes that would have little interest in the Battlemaster, 'callsign; Sentients. Data indicates they are highly evolved and dangerous, and should never be approached unless you have an armored column at your side.'

'That bad?' Aurelius asked, genuine surprise in his voice. It was rare the Guard ever encountered something a single squad couldn't take on by itself. If one of these grotesques could tear through anything short of a tank brigade, the pitiful half-strength squad at his side would be an ill-match in combat if they faced one without intensive security between them and the Sentient's teeth. However, Caius quickly ended that premature line of thought, although they did little to comfort.

'Not exactly,' the Master of Shadows corrected him, eyes still riveted on the screen, 'but those fungal growths in it's mouth are far from your average ones; they secrete trail pheromones, not spores.'

'So we can't get infected even if we breath in close quarters with him?' Aurelius asked, noting the potential weakness in the new foe with some suspicion. In his past experiences, if something lacked a strength, it usually made up for that shortcoming elsewhere. Caius' next words proved his grievances correct in short order.

'You do realize his dentures aren't the most sterile surfaces around? You could still get strain from his teeth,' he read out, 'and it's a mutation of the original; you won't progress from runner to clicker, Aurelius. It's a completely different biological evolution pathway. And I hate to say it, but these Fireflies must have been in the dark about this for sometime, because I ain't got jack here about any other stages of infection, apart from the first.'

'What's the first stage?'

'Bugger...' the Guardsman whispered, before he spoke up to elaborate his findings.

'The pheromones in his mouth are designed to draw in other infected,' he muttered darkly, 'and since there's so few of them, it doesn't take a great concentration to draw a sizable force. And, to make matters even worse, the brain's completely manipulated to serve the parasite, with the exception of the prefrontal cortex.'

'Again,' came an annoyed voice, 'layman's terms. I'm not a scientist Caius, just a soldier.' Unfortunately though, Caius didn't share the light humor, which promptly wiped the minute smile off Aurelius' face. Whatever Caius had found, it was long past bad on the spectrum of events.

'The brain's decision making center; the main region of cognitive thought!' the Guardsman blurted out. 'These things aren't feral; they bloody know what the hell they're doing. They're intelligent.'

'Shit,' was the only answer that met the Master of Shadows. After several more moments of rifling through the dense material, Caius suddenly threw a hand out, grabbing at a stack of parchments on the desk he was seated at, recalling their value to the Battlemaster. Knowledge was power, he decided.

'And to cap it, take a look at this.' The Guardsman thrust the set of medical papers into his commander's hands, before he gestured vehemently toward a block of text at the bottom of the first page; a series of hurried scrawls in blunted lead.

_.. and the subject also demonstrates high resilience to pain and damage, as it exhibits a near regenerative strain of the Cordyceps. It is unclear as of now, but preliminary tests indicate cases of the fungal strain bonding to red blood cells and platelets to encourage regeneration of damaged tissue, all the while still retaining the subject's ability to cogently achieve tasks, though they seem to be manipulated in favour of the fungus._

Aurelius looked up with more than a little disdain etched under his helmet.

'Don't tell me we can't even kill the bastards.'

'Unknown there,' the Master of Shadows replied, swinging about again on a flimsy human chair that, by all rights, should have collapsed inward with the Guardsman's armor and internal mass alone. 'They didn't even capture this one; he turned halfway through the... oh.'

'What's 'oh'?' Aurelius demanded, already bracing himself for more bad news. Hesitantly, Caius continued on through the report.

'Daniel was found with two bite wounds,' he uttered, 'one was a day old; the other was three years old. The bastard was immune.'

It took Aurelius several moments to digest the magnitude behind the words, as Caius pressed on through another hastily compiled report on the matter.

'They were about to tear this guy's head a new one, when 'it' happened.' He whispered darkly, though it sounded clearly through the Battlemaster's comm bead. 'Must have been dumb luck the insects strapped him down before they started cutting him apart. Either way though, I could really suggest keeping this sick boy away from the girl; 'immunity' didn't seem to do him any favors against the Sentient strain.'

Even as he said the words, the Sentient began hammering at it's walls once more, screaming incontinently through the dense growths that spanned it's wasted maw, and Aurelius found himself drawing his own hellfire pistol and raising it to the glass. If this thing got loose, he decided, it might well infect their only chance at a cure, and he'd be damned before that happened. As if sensing it's imminent demise, the Sentient began screaming and cursing through the thick glass, beating against it's confines with renewed desperation, it's enhanced muscles driving it's fists back and forth against the weakening observation window.

The glass began to crack.

Aurelius wasn't taking any chances.

He pulled the trigger back, and quickly fired twice more to ensure that, without a doubt, he ended the threat.

The first shot shattered the reinforced glass, and tore into the Sentient's flesh, as the submunitions within the shell scattered into the confined space.

The second set of rounds ripped apart the Setient's maw, and head, in short order. Croaking through it's shredded vocal cords, the monster fell back with it's left cheek gone, and half it's head to cap. It's death calls weakening with every passing moment, the Battlemaster jammed his trigger hand through the shattered opening and planted one last hellfire in it's heart for reassurance.

It's shrieks ceased.

* * *

'We're leaving right bloody now,' Aurelius announced when the grim faced pair returned to the top floor. Apart from Korventhor's single nod though, there was no reply from the room's occupants.

Aurelius made no comment. He was still at odds with who he'd have supported in their situation, but a philosophical debate was the last thing on his mind right now with an imminent threat. Already, Octavius had reported a horde numbering at least a dozen in strength had torn down the front doors, and were on their way inside. The only advantage the understrength team had was the fact that their presence remained to be detected by the once-humans, and Aurelius planned to keep that. With Decius having landed the Omen atop the hospital's roof several minutes prior to the Battlemaster's arrival on the top floor, Aurelius was impatient, to say the least, to get airborne again.

At least, he decided darkly; if Caius couldn't extract the parasite without killing her, the revelations opened up the possibility of removing Joel from the equation permanently, if suicidal missions were still on his mind.

She still wouldn't vouch for him under those circumstances, right?

Yet, for the life of him, some guilty voice in his gut told him that he was on the wrong path. That it was far from incorrect to at least sympathize with the humans' conflicted feelings.

He reached into his cold heart and tore that voice asunder.

* * *

'Castor, Titus, do you copy?' he called over the comms as he ushered the stiff pair along the blood stained corridors, all the while trying to cover the forward angles of the tightly knit squad as they advanced.

'Acknowledged,' came a whisper, 'and we'd really like that order to extract now; you've got visitors at the gates; a lot of them. Too many to engage silently.'

'We noticed. Can you withdraw?' the Battlemaster demanded, grunting as he slammed himself against another set of the hospital's swinging doors.

'We're cut off,' put in the other Guardsman, 'but hostiles are headed for the lower levels; we'll head up once it's clear. That might be a while though, sir. There's a lot of them.'

'Negative, Titus,' Aurelius muttered back, recalling too late the concentrated pheromones that were obviously still seeping from the Sentient's corpse downstairs, and he cursed his rash response to the threat.

_Should have just left him to starve in that containment cell_, he thought bitterly. The last thing logic would have suggested was to shatter the airtight cell, and bring the horde down on the battered team. 'Make your way to origional drop zone; the building across the street we hit first. We'll meet you on the roof. Decius, be ready to dust off any time now.'

He snapped the link shut with a single thought, saving the spores the effort of closing the conversation.

'Step up the pace,' he grunted back to the two downcast humans, as he ate up the distance to the next corner, 'we're running out of time.'

'Something spook you, Aurelius?' Korventhor asked.

'Doesnt matter now,' the Battlemaster replied curtly, 'we just get in the air before downstairs' residents catch up with us.'

The Battlemaster thundered up the last flight of stairs, disregarding any real caution as he kept the reloaded hellfire rifle in his hands trained ahead. All that mattered now was getting airborne, before the shit hit the fan.

Aurelius kicked down the last set of doors onto the roof, and, with some misgivings, felt the steel under his heel hit something organic, and the startled shriek of surprise on the far side of the wall left him severely doubting his confidence in the drop site's security.

He barreled out, rolling forward as he sprayed suppressed fire at whatever dark shape his eyes could register, trusting Decius to have remained inside his vessel, lest he be claimed by the deadly munitions. At the Battlemaster's back, a dozen more sharp cracks errupted from the stocky barrels of the deadly hellfire weapons of his brothers, followed by more screams of pain as the rounds found their marks. Then, heavy, dead weights hit the ground without another sound passing their mutilated lips.

Aurelius holstered the partly spent rifle as he rose to his feet, drawing a fully armed hellfire pistol at the same time. His feet cleared two more cold infected corpses, before he reached the Omen's side. The main deployment ramp was wide open, and several wires hung awkwardly, sending sparks out at irregular intervals, bathing the dimmed interior of the vessel in randomized patterns of darkness.

So far though, the Raven remained to be seen.

Steeling his resolve, Aurelius ducked inside, advancing along the ruined vessel's length, praying to find some evidence of his missing Guardsman.

He quickly found enough, but it was far from what he'd hoped for.

A bloody leg, still encased in the back carapace of the Guard, lay wedged in a maze of fallen debris, and a long black trail of blood led deeper within the dead craft. Sunken eyes piercing the dark, the Battlemaster's gaze followed the eerie path to the Omen's wasted cockpit.

There, in the damaged doorway, a hulking figure stood guard over the ruins, and for a moment, the Battlemaster let out a sigh of relief in his brother's survival.

Then he realized this thing still had both it's legs attached.

The brooding monster turned about, it's dense, bloated form bristling against the steel confines of the Omen. In it's hand, it hefted a limp, armored shell that had been torn at the waist.

And whilst the victim's head was gone, the Battlemaster could plainly see, lying discarded behind the new monstrosity, the cracked, bloodied helmet of a Guardsman of the 23rd.

* * *

**Now to reply some comments**

**(To Vindictam): Thanks for the support once more. Sorry I've been late with a personel list for the vanguard team (needed some reccent adjustment in light of this chapter.)**

**Aurelius; Battlemaster and Stormcaller  
Caius; Master of Shadows  
Korventhor; Master of Ordnance  
Leandros; Blademaster  
Castor; Hunter  
Titus; Battle brother  
Octavius; Battle brother  
Marius; Hunter (KIA)  
Lucius; Hunter (KIA)  
Claudius; Battle brother (KIA)  
Remus; Battle brother (KIA)  
Decius; Raven of Omen 17 (KIA)**

**To the anonymous guest reviewer; Thanks for your support.  
In reply to your question; I couldn't post 'Light fades' as a cross over because there is no 'Shadow Guard' universe. It's the culmination of inspiration from a variety of sources sci-fi sources mish-mashed into my own. I've tried to write several stories of the 23rd's journey so far, but each never felt quite right.  
Many thanks to Naughty Dog for ending those issues!**

**Next chapter; 'Luck had to run out someday' coming next sunday.**


	14. Luck had to run out someday

_That could have gone worse.  
Aurelius, Stormcaller, during the Battle of the Sigma Ridgeline, Excelon, prior to human counterattack._

The demonic entity threw the remaining half of the Raven at the Battlemaster, before it let out a distorted screech, and thundered down the Omen at the Guardsman.

Aurelius side stepped the throw, disgust forcing him to avoid the remains of his fallen brother, before the infected creature was upon him.

'Hostile contact!' he bellowed down the comms, as he turned about, goading the beast to follow him.

Straight into the guns of the 23rd.

Even as he leapt from the main deployment hatch, thunder lit up around Aurelius as hellfire rounds ripped into flesh at his back. Kicking his feet over the last of the metal surface, the Battlemaster turned about in mid flight, drawing his own rifle to end the fight.

Only to come face to face with the furious, breathing, Infected.

It slammed into him with a force to match a cannon ball, sending him sprawling onto the concrete in a daze.

In that moment, the rest of the Guard threw themselves at the beast, tearing at it with blade and Talon, keeping it from the vulnerable Battlemaster.

Screaming in frustration, it lumbered out of the vicious circle, trampling Octavius and Caius under it's heavy feet as it did so, before it turned it's non existent eyes upon the two humans; positioned just behind the Battlemaster, who had managed to recover his weapon.

The monster snarled in hatred, and like a bull seeing red, it thundered toward the small knot of 'living' creatures.

Half lying on his back, there was no chance in a living hell the Battlemaster could evade the maddened man again. Aurelius had enough time to squeeze off two more rounds before the familiar force smashed him aside again, before two more impacts, and the subsequent crashes of soft bodies landing hard on a solid ground, told him enough that the same fate had cursed the two humans. It might have finished the gruesome job right then, had a familiar shape not tore apart the Infected's legs; namely the Achilles tendons that kept the creature standing.

Bellowing out in pain, the thing collapsed to the ground under the Blademaster's assault, before Aurelius threw himself back into the melee.

'This is for Decius, you bastard!' He unleashed the Talons across his right hand as he screamed the words. Then, he brought the lethal fist down on the bloater's head in a series of brutal strikes that reduced even the armored head of the creature to a bloody mess of digested brain-matter.

Finally, long after it's screams had died away into the night, he retracted the gore-stricken blades, and tentatively pried open the human's closed hand.

There was a piece of a Guard's helmet there; most of it crushed beyond recognition. Fishing through the debris though, the Battlemaster's fingers closed about the only quarry to survive the new creature's brutal assault.

_Linus Decius; Raven._

With a grim acceptance, he popped open the small, constant pouch at his side, and dropped the identification chip into the mass of similar metallic sheets.

One more name to avenge.

* * *

'Now would someone care to tell me; what the hell was that thing?' demanded Korventhor, as he marched back out of the ruined Omen.

'A bloater,' Joel managed, drawing in deep breaths, after being winded heavily in the fall, 'the fourth stage of infection. Heavily armored.'

'Any weaknesses for next time?' Asked Aurelius. Joel sighed as he answered, recalling the only real weakness of the monstrosities.

'Fire, and thats about it. They're blind, like Clickers though.'

'I'll remember that for next time,' replied Aurelius, though he still remembered his brother in the ruin of the Omen.

Decius was long dead, he knew. The second he'd not picked up the Raven's biosignature, he should have known something was wrong. However, his thoughts were interrupted by the girl.

'Aurelius, you were saying something earlier. About, whatever you found downstairs.'

He just gave her a grim glance, though it was lost once more through the stony gaze of the blackened armor.

'A new threat.'

* * *

'Do you think you can extract it?' Aurelius asked. After recycling team's grappling lines, and a harrowing high altitude glide over a street of infected without any real secure safety harness in the case of the two humans, the mauled squad had returned to the first Firefly outpost they'd hit in the ruins of the office structure across the road, where they'd managed to reunite with Castor and Titus, though the greeting was greatly overshadowed by the recent death of another brother.

Now, with Aurelius having dispatched his team on either picket duty, or salvage and recovery of whatever had survived within the bowels of the deceased Omen, only he and Caius remained; seated on what should have been a human's work desk, had it not been for the apocalypse. Meanwhile, Ellie and Joel sat over on the far side of the somewhat desolate office, quiet. Silent. They'd been that way since their hard landing, and a quick briefing by the Battlemaster on the capabilities of the new strain.

'Certainly.' replied Caius, 'I've had enough practice, and we have the research from the lab. And I think there may even be a means to keep her alive through out the process. If we were to...'

'Save it, Caius,' the Battlemaster cut in, heading off another science lesson. 'I just need to know if one; it can be extracted, and two; can she be kept alive?' As the words left his mouth, he gazed up, eyes wary of any possible acknowledgement from the humans. There was a reason he'd instructed Caius to keep all further communications to internalized comms only, but there was that nervous gut feeling of a secret being exposed.

'We can't give them false hope,' continued Aurelius carefully, 'but if we can't, and he knows, he may well try to pull the same stunt that killed whatshername?'

'Marlene.'

'Yes, and we can't have that. So, can you guarantee it or not?'

Caius gave it a few more moments of thought before he took the leap of faith in theorized science.

'I have the means; we just need to drag her out of this hell hole.'

Aurelius simply nodded, confident in his friend's apparent confidence, before he eyed the two hunched figures ahead of him once more. Something, somewhere, he felt a twinge of guilt, that they'd have to drag an innocent into the fire once more for the good of all.

He shook himself, and tore that bloody feeling apart once more. No human was innocent, he heard Corinthus echo in his mind. After what they'd done to his race, the pair was lucky that they hadn't been torn asunder by the 23rd's arrival. They were a means to an end, nothing more, he told himself. Besides, the 23rd had pulled off worse odds in the past.

Yet, for once in his life, that voice of pity remained where it shouldn't have; in a Battlemaster of the Shadow Guard.

'You think they'll be okay?' Caius asked him absentmindedly, and Aurelius couldn't help but notice the genuine concern there.

I'm not the only one getting attached, he thought, and he made a mental note to try to distance himself and the squad from the two humans, to prevent distractions. He answered the question truthfully though, and had to be grateful that the helm's voice distortion erased any sign of concern on his part.

'Considering the fact that she's just found out that he either killed or turned against every person that she held most dear, including the fact one was a near mother to her, and the additional fact that he's lied to her for the past year on the matter, I'd say highly unlikely.'

'You think we could help?'

There it was again, Aurelius noted. He slanted his head sideways to study his old friend. Like the Battlemaster, Caius was also encased in the unyielding carapace, and outwardly, he looked as if he were another of the steadfast praetorians on guard duty before the council's chambers; nearly motionless, a statue of iron and flesh. But Aurelius had known his friend for too long. A slightly bent neck, the Guardsman's remaining organic hand twitching in the shadow of his cloak; thumb pressing against the index finger, told Aurelius enough. He did care for them, and right now, attachment outside of their brothers was the last thing he needed in a combat situation.

'Why would that be Caius?' he asked, turning back to the pair in question, 'we'll probably never understand human emotions and motivations; we're just here to get them out of this hell hole, and then we can synthesize a damn cure for this plague. Nothing more.'

'Agreed, Battlemaster,' the Guardsman replied, although Aurelius noted a slight shift in his friend's position, as he corrected the body language that had alerted the Battlemaster too late. 'But don't you think that, well, it would be far easier to get them out of here if they weren't at each other's necks, don't you think? She's far from a Saint you know. Forget about 'forgive and forget' without some intervention.'

Aurelius had to acknowledge that point. Humans had little focus on the larger picture; arguments and distractions occurred regularly in the field with them, something the 23rd had used in the past to their advantage, and the redhead was another prime example. But now that they were allied with the humans, that tendency made them a liability.

For what it was, it was an excellent recovery on Caius' part. But aside from the hidden efforts of concealing his feelings from the Battlemaster, there was another implied, far blunter message there.

_You can go kick down the hornet's nest._

'Fine,' Aurelius groaned, before he raised himself to his feet and moved to settle the matter of the two humans.

* * *

If one were to tune out every noise of the city; the croaks of nocturnal wildlife, and the infected, and left only those produced by the two humans, the silence would have driven most mad. They simply sat, rock solid, staring ahead, a ominous gap between the two. If they hadn't been sitting up, Aurelius might have assumed they both decided to give up on life, since they didn't even seem to dare take a breath in the other's presence. The Battlemaster sighed once more, acknowledging the flare of care in his breast for the two, and knowing they were no longer father and daughter. Searching about in vain for Korventhor, in the hopes he'd be able to spark the whole conversation, albeit bluntly and uncaringly, Aurelius finally stopped procrastinating. He'd thought enough about he'd phrase the whole damn thing anyway. Besides, Korventhor was, along with Octavius, atop the hospital right now, unloading whatever the bloater hadn't destroyed in it's rampage of the once-mighty ship, and he certainly wasn't going to return on the matter of 'fixing some human's shit.'

No, Aurelius decided, he'd have to mend the tear himself.

'I'm not sure if any remnant of his words were shared by human thought,' he opened, startling both Joel and Ellie at his sudden arrival from the back of the open room, 'but Battlemaster Julius Fornus of the famed 1st Shadow Guard once stated 'Everything happens for a reason.''

'What?' The tone of the girl's question surprised him. It was shrill at first, but then it developed into a warning growl. She was probably more disturbed by the revelations than he'd realized earlier, and he decided to elaborate. At the same time though, Joel straightened up at the words, caution and fear buried in his eyes. Why that was so was beyond the Battlemaster.

'He thought there was a reason behind every choice and happening in life, and that...'

Aurelius got no further, before a sharp crack of iron punching through wood cut him off. The speed at which she'd pinned the switchblade into the makeshift bench, and the hatred behind the act actually made Aurelius take a pair of quick steps away from Ellie's silhouette. He noted with some cautious awe that Joel had also jumped up, and quickly retreated some distance, though it was understandable, that given her current feelings toward the elder man, and her sudden outburst, he was now a potential victim of that deadly blade.

'Don't...mention him.' Her voice was broken, and her entire body shook, from both fear and hatred, and Aurelius quickly sensed, albeit too late, that he'd just stepped on an emotional landline for the girl and, instead of repairing matters, he'd only succeeded in taking a demo-charge to what ruins were left.

Peaking back over his shoulder to his previous spot with the Master of Shadows, Aurelius realized with some dismay that Caius hadn't decided to remain in the room, undoubtedly heading off for another one of his bloody strolls that just conveniently occurred whenever the Battlemaster hit the deepest shit.

Bastard.

* * *

He circled with the sharp blade twice, keeping his distance from the short weapon. Joel tried to add his own voice to try to diffuse the situation, but the advice of lowering the blade fell on deaf ears. Risking a quick peek at the man behind him, Aurelius gave him a quick shrug, and nodded toward the armed girl.

_What the hell is the problem? _He didn't dare voice the unspoken question, fearing it might provoke her into an actual attack. The man's response was frustratingly inadequate though.

'Something that shouldn't have happened.' he whispered.

Turning back, Aurelius could see his situation had not improved by a long way. Time was not the solution here; he had to address the source of the problem.

And the humans, though understandably for the situation, were being remarkably tight-lipped.

There was only one way to figure things out. Thankfully, Caius chose that moment to return.

'What the hell did you do?' he hissed over the comms. Aurelius just waved off the question with a single shake of the head.

'I need to do something you're not going to like Caius.' The Battlemaster whispered cryptically, 'I need you to act as the fail safe.'

'Now wait a moment Aurelius...'

There was more than that in Caius' message, though it never reached the Battlemaster due to the severed link. He needed to concentrate after all.

It had been a long time since using the powers of the Storm, Aurelius knew. Using his gift was not without it's risks. But curiosity, and a need to diffuse the situation peacefully, got the better of him. Besides, entering one's memories was fairly straightforward, according to the late Master of the Storm, though the current Battlemaster had never tried it before.

_All it takes is a leap of faith_. Her words of advice came back to him, and he took the plunge.

* * *

Leaving the confines of his own body, the Stormcaller dove into Ellie' mind, and memory.

_White, crisp snowfall. Not a blizzard like Lementus III; more like a drizzle of cold flakes to create an undisrupted blanket across the landscape._

_Save for the broken trail of blood and the torn up track ahead of them._

_Like an ethereal wraith, Aurelius flittered over the clean landscape, never leaving a single footprint in the soft second layer of cold soil._

_After all, it was a memory he'd never played no part in._

_He could see Ellie plain as day, as she crept down the broken trail, after her quarry; the same bow that Leandros had nearly met his end at held loosely in her hands. In all honesty, he had to admit she was fairly adept at keeping silent as she traversed the flattened wastes._

_It was just that he'd spent far too long finding concealed threats, and becoming them._

_He walked his mind further along the trail, where Ellie had come to a stop, by a dead four legged creature that somewhat resembled a turndark on Lementus III, minus the patterns of camouflage that lined a turndark's hide, and the rows of heavily jagged teeth to supplement it's predatory diet._

_In it's chest, another of the sharpened projectiles lay embedded in blood._

_Before she could recover the arrow again though, a careless foot crushed a dry leaf, sending Ellie hurtling about, facing the general direction of the sound._

'_Who's there?' she called out._

_No answer._

'_Come out!' she ordered again, keeping the bowstring taut. Slowly, hand outstreched in a sign of peace, a man emerged from his hiding place, followed in short order by another younger compatriot, though the younger man certainly didn't share his senior's confidence, as he kept his own trigger hand to his side, in easy access of the concealed pistol at his back._

'_We just want to talk.'_

'_Any sudden moves, and I put one right between your eyes.' Ellie shot back, keeping her own weapon riveted on the two, keeping the hidden pistol in the bodyguard's holster. 'What do you want?'_

_After another tense moment, the older man addressed her once more; without fear, with the total calm that was any Guardsman's goal when under heavy combat._

'_Name's David.'_

* * *

Pain coursed through his mind, as an inquisitive specter got too near in the Storm's realm, and Aurelius cursed his lack of focus on both worlds. If it happened again, a possession might well mark the end of the Guard's Battlemaster.

How pathetic would that be? Dying on the world he hated most, clawing at his own mind in a provoked insanity by a fallen spirit.

Aurelius wouldn't have it.

He sent the unfriendly spirit soaring back into the Storm's vast wastes with a thought, before he reset his mental barriers, and dove back in once more.

* * *

'_We got lucky'_

_She was just answered by a scoff, before the man Aurelius had last identified as David spoke up once more. From the many carcases strewn about the area since the last memory, some deep shit had gone down, and David's compatriot was no where to be seen._

_Dead in a ditch, probably, Aurelius decided. Heading off to get a bottle of antibiotics for a wounded man he didn't even know in the middle of an infected assault? _

_He'd meet his fate at the hands of the Infected for certain._

'_No such thing as luck,' David muttered, before he recited words all too familiar to the Battlemaster. 'Nah, I believe everything happens for a reason.'_

* * *

The memory's walls fell down once more like a house of cards, although this time, it didn't fall on Aurelius's will.

No, rather he'd been cast out by a stubborn mind hell-bent on forgetting a scarring memory.

He stumbled back and grasped at a convenient desk for support, trying to collect his mind for another assault into the past. But hell, she'd fought like a demon to stop his presence drawing up those pasts to the forefront of her mind.

But as always, in a battle of mind and will, none were schooled to the level Aurelius found himself at, and he drove on once more, seeking the bitter truth that might peacefully end the whole affair.

* * *

_The once calm and controlled David Aurelius had seen previously had degenerated into something that further resembled the spitting lunatic Corinthus became when some idiot was mad enough to get him started on his ancient foes. He hacked at shadows about him as he rambled and raved out into the burning air of the town steakhouse. _

_Or rather, at the hidden Ellie he searched the flickering corridors for._

_After what he'd seen, or rather, what Ellie had seen, Aurelius wasn't surprised to find a madman underneath the stoic farce. A cannibal, and with an unhealthy interest in someone under half his age, it wasn't any wonder he was also the host of a broken mind._

_Or maybe it was something to do with the fresh bite in David's hand._

_It didn't matter; only getting the bloody keys for the chained door mattered now._

_Aurelius watched on as the girl leapt at the madman a final time; already her cloths were bathed in blood that wasn't her own. The blade hit home, but for a third time, the bloodied survivor refused to fall without a struggle. They tore at each other for a few brief moments before they both crashed to the ground, unconscious as a result of their combined efforts._

_Every single bloody rib in her chest felt like it was on fire as she dragged herself onward, despite the pain. David's honed blade lay tantalizingly close; only a few more feet away. _

_If only the bastard had stayed down for a few more moments._

_The hard boot tore into her ribs once more, and Ellie gasped for breath, half to continue onward, and perhaps to draw a curse for the fucker at her back._

'_You can try beggin',' the madman muttered darkly. As the words reached her ears, Ellie felt a cold hand plant her head to the ground, and knew it was over. There was only one more thing she could do._

_Spit in the sick prick's face one last time before she met her mother._

'_Fuck you.'_

_At that, David rolled her about to face his furious, blood stained face, as his hands wrapped around her neck. Her breaths grew shallower, and she grabbed at his arms, trying to give herself some more time._

'_Let me tell you something. You have no idea what I'm capable of.'_

_Just as she was about to finally give up though, Ellie's hand hit something hard. A handle._

_She forgot her earlier acceptance of death._

_The machete tore into the madman's arm, before the scarred girl threw herself at him as he screamed for mercy. She didn't care or even registered if she was hitting her mark or not. She just brought the bloody blade down on his head for a long time until a familiar face delivered her from hell._

* * *

Aurelius slumped back, still registering the hundreds of emotions, thoughts and feelings that had coursed through the girl ahead of him over that dark winter, along with the fear and turmoil that followed the harrowing encounter with the cannibal.

He was still contemplating Ellie's experience when he recalled Caius still had his pistol aimed at him.

'Still here,' he muttered light heartedly down the link, before he added, 'in spirit.'

Letting out a pent up breath, the Master of Shadows lowered the aimed hellfire. Ever since he'd lost control of the Storm rift on Exelon, and ended up momentarily possessed by a vengeful spirit, Aurelius had introduced the failsafe system for himself whenever he employed the Storm, though because of his lack of trust in himself to accomplish the full feats his mind was capable of, he'd rarely had much time to come up with better alternatives to having a fellow Guardsman prepared to shoot him in a non vital area to break his mental concentration on the Storm, and a possessing spirit.

However, a choked sob snapped him out of his own thankful thoughts, and he gazed up into shattered emerald eyes. The constant switchblade falling from her clenched hands, Ellie's legs collapsed under her as the tears ran freely from her weeping eyes, as her mind and memories tore at her, having been forced to relive every horror the Battlemaster had just witnessed in a few short moments.

Aurelius rose from his support as soon as he saw the results of his handiwork, but one beat him to it comforting the broken mind once more.

Forgetting his fears of the sharpened knife that lay by the girl's feet, Joel rushed in, trying to comfort Ellie, who'd fallen into a foetal position against a broken desk.

'Don't fucking touch me!' Ellie screamed suddenly, backing away from Joel's embrace.

'I'm sorry, baby,' Joel cried, 'I'm sorry.'

Slowly, the haze of winter's haunting memories cleared from Ellie's eyes, as she realized it was only another hellish dream. It was far from the first, and each time, he'd been there to comfort her in the wake of her trials.

She couldn't forgive him for what he'd done. But she could accept it as something she too, if their roles were reversed, would have done for him.

Finally, she returned the gesture, as her own arms clung about the older man, her reddened eyes streaming tears all the while.

'For what it's worth,' a distorted voice muttered, 'I'm sorry for putting you through that.'

No reply met the Battlemaster but a series of sobs, so he ploughed on.

'We can't run from the past.' Aurelius continued, his own bloodied memories searing into his mind with same words that echoed from beneath his dark helm. 'What's done is done. We can't change that. All we can do is forge our futures, and find some redemption for our sins.'

Tentatively, considering if it was at all treasonous to his Fallen brethren before he took the plunge, he held out a hand. A strong grip seized the offered gauntlet, and Aurelius found himself face to face with the grizzled man.

'Thank you.'

For the Guardsman, it was enough.

* * *

'You really could have done that differently; that's all I'm trying to say,' Leandros finished, before he sat up, and strode off to aid Korventhor on the storey above with unloading the Omen's burdens.

Another soft thump sounded across the ceiling, as another crate completed it's sail across the drop lines to the new defense site, and Aurelius leant back into the shadows, drawing up the cowl of his cloak to complete his shroud of darkness.

He had to admit that, despite the fact the thoughts were shared by human madmen, the 1st's Battlemaster had been right. After all, what were the Firefly's chances of cutting up the girl's brain accurately to find a vaccine, with their fugitive status and barely functional equipment? The bestial Makar of his own homeworld would have a better chance. Perhaps it was meant to be that she'd be saved to be delivered into the Guard's hands to synthesize the end of the apocalypse.

Under the darkened helm, Aurelius' face broke into a grin.

_Everything happened for a reason._

The loud crunch of rusting hinges being forced open cut into his thoughts, and the Battlemaster rolled up from his comfortable refuge, to greet the three Guardsmen that had just entered the room. Shortly afterwards, the others also filtered in from differing entrances, though none of them held any of the optimism the Battlemaster had just found in fate.

'This is everything,' Korventhor uttered without a trace of his usual light hearted speach, 'this is all the bastard left intact.'

Considering the fact only a pitiful three crates of varying munitions lay before him, Aurelius didn't question the downcast Guardsman, who was usually more adapted to spending hundreds of rounds on his hungry Executioner in battle. Now, he was left with just over two hundred to share between six gun-totting Guardsmen deep in enemy territory, along with another half dozen fragmentation grenades.

Hardly an ideal kit for what he had in mind.

'Alright,' Aurelius mumbled, trying to figure out how they could split the munitions, 'we'll take...'

He got no further before a small shower of dust filtered down from the ceiling once more.

But unlike before, unless a phantom was moving ammo boxes, no Guardsman existed topside to initiate the transfer operation. That left only one real possibility.

* * *

'Unless we're one man short,' Aurelius muttered darkly, 'we have a hostile target.'

'All present,' replied Korventhor without a care, swinging about the Executioner onto the nearby staircase. The heavy cannon purred once more, ready to shred apart the target when it presented itself.

With Leandros at his side, whilst Octavius and Titus moved to cover the second stairwell on the other side of the floor, the two hulking figures advanced on the door, like prey marching into a predator's open mouth.

'Come on, you bastard,' Leandros taunted, blades at the ready, 'don't be shy. Once I take your stuck up head, it'll all be over...'

He didn't manage to finish the goad, before a dark shape plunged out of the stairwell maw, it's head snapping at the Guardsman with the desperation of starvation.

Acting on instinct, the Blademaster rammed one blade into the figure's gut, whilst the other honed in on the beast's neck. Combined together, the weapons held back the monster in a brutal death grip, while Leandros studied his foe and gave the rest of the team time to aim their weapons on the infected man.

It was only then that, in the moon's light that flickered through the open windows of the office, that Leandros realized half of the man's head was missing, fresh blood coating it's wounds.

While he had seen many infected clickers have most of their flesh covered by the parasite, this one appeared to actually be missing flesh, namely the better part of it's upper left section of the head, along with it's chest, replaced by fungal armor. It was as if it had grown rapidly to accommodate the injury, much like how Guard augmentics were fixed onto Guardsmen after battles to replace missing limbs and the like.

What's more, this thing had a wiry strength he hadn't seen before.

The monster gripped his wrists with it's own hands and in a single motion, drove them inward and over one another, flipping the blademaster over, onto his back, exposed to the creature, who hovered over him now, ready to sink it's teeth into it's next meal.

A thunder of fire stopped it's downward movement though, as the remaining Guardsmen opened up on the infected, driving it away from their fallen brother. Aurelius noted though, with grim realization, that not one hellfire had struck the fiend. It moved fast; almost as fast as a xeno, but certainly with greater grace and agility then the blood soaked horrors from beyond the stars. It was certainly far faster than any ordinary human should physically be able to.

Ordinarily, full automatic fire would be the protocol to fight such an enemy, but supplies were already taxed after the battle in the hospital. With the Omen out of commision, and no end of the mission in sight, they just couldn't afford to waste more rounds.

Then he recalled the brief inventory that had been recovered from the ruined vessel. Whilst six only gave him a single chance to get things right, a multitude of high explosive grenades could well hold the answer to the stubborn Sentient.

'Korventhor!' he cried to the Master of Ordnance, 'drop your grenades; short fuse. Everyone else, get clear right...'  
That was until a heavy weight crashed into his side, and sent him sprawling into the dust, as he fought back against the creature. It clawed at him with determined resolve, it's brain functioning despite it's missing sections. Only then did his discovery in the heart of lab come back to him.

_... And the subject also demonstrates high resilience to pain and damage, as it exhibits a near regenerative strain of the Cordyceps, and it seen to be able to still access cogent thought in achieving it's goals._

'Too bloody right,' the Battlemaster managed to mutter, before he was able to lock his arms about the Sentient's neck, arresting it's thrashing movements to deliver the parasite into his bloodstream.

_Cut off the head of the serpent, and the body dies with it._ Corinthus' many teachings returned to the Battlemaster once more, and he kicked out at human that had once been known as Daniel, even as it clawed at him in another renewed effort to end the small company's leadership.

Just then, a pair of hellfires crashed into the monster's side, throwing it off of Aurelius' chest.

'Get out of here, Guardsman!' he cried out at Octavius, before he gestured violently at the edge of the roof. 'Drop lines, now!'

The Guardsman simply nodded in acknowledgement, just halting to unleash another burst of fire onto the unique infected beast.

Dragging himself backwards, Aurelius managed back away from the enraged Sentient, angling his approach to intersect with Ellie and Joel, who had yet to land a single hit on the erratic monster, due in no small part to it's crazed motions. Then, the Battlemaster recalled the whole purpose of the damn mission, and realized baiting the madman into the general area of the person the company was meant to protect at all costs was far from a logical option.

He was about to change course once more when Leandros threw himself at the spitting creature, Talons crashing against the hardened carapace of the new Infected. Breathing a thanks that would never reach the Blademaster's ears, Aurelius stumbled up to his feet, before he arrested a hold on Ellie's left arm. At his side, Caius did the same to Joel, and the pair let the sturdy drop lines at their belts unravel for use once more.

'Get clear!'

Leandros' sudden warning gave Aurelius enough time to sidestep the off balance Sentient, as it tumbled past him under the Blademaster's repeated assaults, nearly driving it to the edge of the structure, though it's crude mind still gave it an even chance.

Throwing it's arms out as expendable shields, the Infected let the two blades in the Guardsman's hands sink deep into flesh, before they came to a sickening halt, devoid of any sufficient energy to break the reinforced bone beneath Daniel's forearms. It might have ended the Blademaster right then and there, if it hadn't registered the small pack of explosives Korventhor had placed at the heart of the level, it's timer nearly exhausted.

'See you in hell, you piece of shit.' Cursing once more at the beast for depriving the Blademaster of two weapons, Leandros let go, leaving two of his fine blades embedded in the Sentient's arms, before he sprinted for the unoccupied drop line left by the Master of Ordnance. At the same time, Caius stepped back, into empty space, dragging a hapless Joel with him as gravity took over.

'Joel!' Ellie managed, before the Battlemaster at her own side followed in suit, the only warning given being the crack of a drop line's deployment end securing itself into the concrete ground, whilst the magnetized wire locked into the Guardsman's belt. Then, the pair were hurling downward, straight for the hard ground below.

'You are fucking crazy!' Ellie half shouted, half screamed at Aurelius in fear, as they plummeted downwards.

'Don't worry,' Aurelius managed, gritting his teeth in concentration, 'We've done this enough times.' As he said the words, he aligned himself parallel to the rapidly approaching ground, before his feet made contact with the wall of the hospital. At the same time, his armored gauntlet tightened its grip about the wire, slowing their descent and allowing him to run down the wall, all the keeping an iron grip on her arm.

Then there was a sudden loss of tension in the wire, and Aurelius recalled too late once more of the Sentient's intelligence in achieving it's goals.

This time, it had done so by tearing out the drop line and letting go.

The two of them dropped away from the wall like falling debris from an explosion on the top floor of a structure, as the beast atop of them howled it's triumph.

In time for the explosive package to self destruct.

Managing to position himself below the flailing girl to take the brunt of the impact, Aurelius was also gifted with a final satisfying image of the sudden explosion that engulfed the silhouetted figure in fire, before he hit the ground, and everything went to black.

* * *

'Aurelius!'

Trying to blink the lapse of unconsciousness away, Aurelius vaguely managed to make out his surroundings.

Most of it was just a haze, but he could see the tell tale red shirt worn by the girl.

Then he also realized there were figures as well. Dozens.

And their builds left no margin for mistaking them as Guardsmen.

'Aurelius!' she screamed again, as the infected stumbled after her. She fired into one figure's head, spraying the Battlemaster with gore. Annoyed, Aurelius tried to rise, but then quickly realized that, to his horror, he couldn't move anything.

He couldn't even feel anything below his neck, which throbbed with pain.

He didn't need to consolidate the suit's interface to know that his spine was fractured, nor did he need to ask it for suggested options. There were none without any of his limbs functioning, apart from praying to the Great Father, in the hopes Caius and the others could reach him and the girl in time. He tried the comms, but all that replied him was static. Damn spores. They were all about him, and with some dread, he realized that they had fallen into a covered greenhouse, filled with corpses secreting the foul particles.

Then a dark figure leapt into the clearing. But it bore no black armor; it was only singed black through being at the heart of a heavy detonation, and Aurelius gaped in nervous awe at the Sentient's continued existence. What the hell it would take to kill the monster, he didn't know.

The creature that was once Daniel let out another a half scream, half chitter as it charged at Ellie, knocking her from her feet and straight into the ruined wall at her back.

It was only as the beast lunged it's fangs at the girl, that Aurelius realized he did have a solution after all. It was the last thing he wanted to do, without another to act as his fail safe, but desperate times called for desperate measures.

* * *

Planting both hands firmly on the empty pistol in her hands, and using it as a bite guard against the Sentient, Ellie rammed the firearm into the thrashing creature's mouth, desperate to keep it away from her. It was nearly a new feeling; fearing the bite of the infected. She'd only felt it once before; in that darkened mall two years ago. Now the feeling was back.

The Sentient gagged on the iron bar for a split second, before it's crude logic kicked in, and it seized her right hand, only for Ellie to remember too late of the capabilities of this new foe. She kicked out at the Infected, trying to free her trapped hand, the other still locked in a vice grip around the pistol's barrel. Once that fell away from the Sentient's maw, she was already dead. The Sentient refused to yield, and nearly looked to be grinning.

_You should have died long ago,_ its seemed to say.

Arresting its grip on her wrist; one mutated hand above the joint and one below it, Daniel gave her a warning growl, before the Sentient rolled its own hands in opposite directions, snapping bone.

The act was so sudden and unexpected that it took a full second for the pain to register. Then it hit her, as the Sentient pressed its advantage, pushing her hand back, beyond the wrist's normal arc.

She screamed as her hand was broken backwards, and instinctively, let go of the pistol to nurse her wounded arm.

Spitting the metal from its mouth, the Sentient howled it's triumph, and loomed high over Ellie, ready to feed on its next meal. Fighting through the tears of pain, and managing a final glimpse at her killer, she still fought.

'Go fuck yourself,' she whispered hoarsely at the Infected. The words seemed to register to the Sentient, judging from its slight recoil from the defiant form at its feet. Then it screamed its victory once more before it sank its teeth into soft flesh. Then the whole world went black.

* * *

It was an unnatural black, she realized. She couldn't be dying; it didn't make any sense. It was like the light had just been sapped from the Earth. And behind the Sentient, an ominous blue glow seemed to emanate from the prone form of the Battlemaster. Or rather, from his helmet's sunken eyes.

'The Fallen take you, bastard!'

Then Hell was unleashed.

Like a portal into the Abyss had just been opened, a solid rip in the air materialized beside Aurelius. Only partly conscious from her wounds, Ellie was spared the full horror of the Storm, but even with her blurred vision, there were things in there that would replace her nightmares of that burning steakhouse, and the man that had hunted her in there. She didn't think he could come back in death to haunt her once more as a ghost. She screamed, begging God and every other deity across the globe to banish him back to Hell.

But the gate did not close, and it's occupants poured forth into the mortal realm; ghosts, specters and demons, all tinged a sinister blue hue; similar to the portal at their backs, and they crashed into the horde, setting whatever they touched alight in an ethereal blaze.

A dozen of the ghostly forms surrounded her attacker, and in one concerted mass, phased through the Sentient. In an instant, the creature once known as Daniel burst into flame, flesh and bone turning to ash.

Strangely, despite the heat that radiated from the Sentient, Ellie felt nothing, if only a ghostly chill, throughout the course of the ethereal inferno. Finally, the spirits departed from the Sentient, and it tumbled to the ground in a pile of sickly ash.

Then they turned their blood shot eyes on her. Especially him; cold eyes blazing at her like they did during that damnable winter. She wondered briefly if he remembered his death, and her responsibility.

Judging from the way his face split into a savage grin; the one a feral hunter so often finds itself wearing when it's prey is cornered, he did.

Throughout her eventful life, Ellie had experienced fear plenty of times, no incident more so than her escape from David and his cannibals. But nothing could have prepared her for this. She cried at the unfairness of it. Why of all people was it him that got a second chance for revenge?

Cradling her broken hand against her chest, she lay against the wall, unable to scream for aid any more, as the Fallen reached out for her, whispering for her to join them in death.

* * *

_No._

Gritting his teeth in the effort, Aurelius dragged back the Lost with what little mental strength he had left. He was at the end of his reserves now; having exhausted most of his fortitude in opening the rift in the first place.

Now he had to banish them once more, before the frail leash that was his concentration over the spirits broke, and they were able to run amok, laying waste to all. Particularly the one that reached for Ellie now. He recognized him from her memories, and had seen what he'd done, and knew what he could do now as one of the Fallen. It was immense misfortune that of the countless souls that could have been pulled from the Storm to do his work, David had been one of them. Or perhaps he'd never left her; following her in the other realm, waiting for a chance at vengeance, as most of the dead did to their killers.

It had happened in the past, to others that now marched as the Fallen, and Aurelius had sworn before to never let it happen on his accord.

With nothing other than brute mental force, he wrestled with the baying spirits, dragging them back from the terrified girl, and back toward the portal. They screamed and cursed him for denying their carnage; all but one.

Standing tall above the rest, seemingly hovering over a carpet of mist, one figure; a familiar one at that, guided the others back to their home. One that still donned the hallowed armor of the 23rd, and wore a single eagle, it's wings outstretched to the sky, across it's chest.

She was without her helm, the way she died, but still she aided him in death. Soothing the hatred of the Lost, she was the last one through the gate.

Aurelius lost consciousness from the effort of holding the portal open long enough for the Fallen to make their way back, but before the darkness had completely claimed him, he saw her give him a single graceful bow, just as she had at their every parting, save her passing. And in that moment, Aurelius knew she too had never left his side. Her vengeance had already been found. He'd seen to that.

'Thank you, Serena...' he managed, before the darkness fully clouded his sight, and the portal snapped shut once more, leaving no trace but the charred remains of the Fallen's victims.

* * *

Ducking under the charging runner, Caius lifted the once-human off it's feet and let it crash into the broken road behind him, before snapping off another hellfire to end its pitiful life. Around him, the Guard fought off the horde, using hellfire and blade. Joel, who had been taken down by Caius himself, added his own contributions, ensuring a steady rain of improvised weaponry on the enemy. Whilst they were crude, Caius had to admit their effectiveness, and ingenuity of humans when threatened.

To think that all one needed to stop a horde was a bottle of spirits wrapped in cloth and set alight?

Humans were dangerous to their enemies, and a bloody gift to their allies.

But the projectiles were running out, and Joel's aim had begun to falter somewhat, and Caius couldn't help but consider it was to do with the fact Aurelius and Ellie had yet to arrive. Originally, he'd trusted his friend to make it on his own, but so far, nothing had reached him.

'We're going to need to break contact soon, Caius,' Korventhor told him over the blaze of the Executioner, 'I'm not seeing an end to them.'

'And don't forget Aurelius,' put in the Blademaster over the comms, his words jolted from his mouth as his blade crashed against another thickened carapace of fungal parasites across the forehead of a clicker.

'Agreed,' Caius replied. It was then though that he saw something that chilled his blood. The light draining from the battlefield, and a ghostly blue lighting up the sky; not too far off to their right. If he'd still been undecided, that would have been the final push.

'Break contact now!' he broadcasted the message across the short range comms. He didn't need to tell them where to go; the boiling Storm had been seen by all, and there was only one Guardsman alive that could still use it.

As they went, Octavius grabbed Joel; as the message had been restricted to the comm helms, he'd stood his ground against the onrushing enemy.

'They're over there!' he told the man. That was enough to set Joel sprinting through the ruins, to find his constant companion and hope.

Only halting to drop another demolition charge at the base of the door into the next structure, Octavius sprinted for next doorway, before his back was signed by the inferno of the shortly delayed charge. The crumbling building, already on it's last legs, finally relented to death, and collapsed upon itself, burying or blocking off the Infected that tried to follow. As he finally picked his way through the debris to the other side, he was rewarded with an icy glare from the Master of Ordnance.

'You're taking my job, Guardsman,' he grunted darkly, before he snickered at the Guardsman's guilty face. After all this time, people still took him too seriously. Probably because he knew how end them the most painful way possible. Just then, he let a trail of fire errupt from the Executioner in his hands, tearing apart a desperate runner that had managed to make it through the maze like ruin. His need for bloodshed sated though, his mood softened, and he lowered the heavy rifle in his hands, allowing the guilty Guardsman to scuttle on quickly, before he changed his mind. Grinning under the helm, Korventhor unlocked the exhausted chain of ammunition from the cannon, and replaced it with all haste, as movement began to intensify once more behind the barricade created by Octavius.

He was going to have his combat, one way or another.

The belt clicked in place, and the rifle was raised once more, daring anyone to wander into it's sights with its tell tale whine, as it spooled up to fire.

There were no end of volunteers, though the ruins blocked any attempt to follow the tempting sound of life, and another meal.

* * *

Caius led the way, followed closely by the Blademaster, and then Joel. They kept to the shadows of the houses as they followed the ominous cracking of the Storm. Moving at a steady jog, with Caius and Leandros keeping their eyes forward for frontal threats alongside Joel, whilst Titus and Castor checked over every angle at the left and right of the formation respectively, the team traversed across through the twisting, crumbling masonry with speed. Meanwhile, Octavius raised his rifle to the ruined floorboards of the upstairs level, in the event a threat were to drop from the rafters above, whilst Korvethor moved backwards, covering their rear as he did so.

It was then that they heard the screaming. Not an Infected's distorted one, but one of sheer terror. A human's. A girl's.

Instantly, the formation cracked, as Joel sprinted forward, throwing caution to the winds. Stunned for a split second at the reckless act, Caius nearly didn't see the stalker crouched in the shadow of the decaying couch until it was too late, as it reared it's mutilated head to strike.

His hellfire round severed it's sickening head from it's body at the jawline, and Caius began to muttered a curse at the human for his madness, before understanding stopped him.

The scream had been Ellie's. Soon, he took off in pursuit as well, rapidly motioning for the rest of the Guard to cover his exposed flanks as he burst from the building.

Rapidly rotating to cover every angle of possible attack as he emerged from the structure, Caius soon found the street to be clear, the only contact being Joel, as he plunged into another side alley, guiding them to the far side of the hospital, where Aurelius had dropped, following the screams.

'Ellie!' His own voice cracked in his desperation, and Joel pelted as fast as he could, ignoring any threat to his own being. He heard rapid strikes on gravel as feet impacted against the ground at his back; the snarls of the infected; followed by two cracks of Caius' Judgement, and two corpses falling to the ground.

He never turned around.

Reaching the end of the alley, he saw the greenhouse. The unnatural storm above it had abated now, but the street beyond him was a slaughterhouse unlike any he'd seen before. Carbon statues of infected forms stood where they'd died, as if some immensely hot inferno had consumed them all. And the air was thick; not with spores, but with flesh and bone turned to ash. It was almost as if it was snowing; a blizzard from Hell.

'Great Father,' Caius breathed, as he reached Joel. There were no more contacts, at least any that lived. He'd only seen this kind of massacre once before, when he and the full might of the 23rd had dropped onto Excelon to recover Aurelius from Hell.

The last Stormcaller had unleashed that Hell.

And now he had done it again.

* * *

Inserting his long rifle past the shattered door, Caius tested for any infected presence with the bait of movement, before he advanced carefully inside. There was nothing waiting immediately behind the doorway, apart from another carbonized corpse that disintegrated into a pile of sickening ash when the Judgement came too close.

But it wasn't the Infected he was fearing.

After so long without it, fear had him cold once again, as memories of the Fallen staring at him from the Abyss came back to haunt him.

If they burst forth, nothing save Aurelius could deliver them.

But there was nothing.

Oblivious to the threat of the spectres, Joel entered first. There was another moment of agonizing silence before he unexpectedly reholstered the revolver in his hand. Moving forward, he came to another of the ash statues; one slumped against the wall, one arm cradling the other.

Then Caius noticed it; a whimper.

He moved inside, now slightly more confident with the survival of someone indicating the lack of Fallen in the area, to see Joel brush away the ash that coated the face of the figure, revealing intact flesh underneath, and green eyes.

Tears aided the effort, as they streaked from her eyes, washing the vile ash away in thin lines down her face.

'Oh, baby girl,' he whispered, before he cradled her in his arms, rocking back and forth minutely, hoping to sooth the terrified girl. Despite all their pasts, Caius couldn't help yet another twinge of empathy for them, and this time, he couldn't bring himself to tear it asunder.

_This is what they really are_, he realized. _Not born killers. Families. Just like us once._

He started toward them, before his right foot hit something hard. Another figure of ash. But this one didn't disintegrate on impact.

And this one was large; far more so than any normal human, covered in armor from head to toe.

And if it wasn't enough, the stylized eagle head insignia told him everything there was to know.

Discarding the Judgement to one side, he grasped his old friend with both hands, and dragged him to his feet, only for the Battlemaster to then collapse back into a heap at Caius' feet.

* * *

'Are you done yet?'

Caius just sneaked a grin over at his impatient friend, although in his current position, anyone would be eager to get it over with quickly. He was currently lying face down in two inches of ash, with Castor sitting on top of his paralysed form with a cutting set in hand, as the Hunter worked to cut open his suit's direct control panel, so that they could crack open his back to repair the damaged spine. Ordinarily, a quick thought would be enough to send a neural impulse to the necessary part of the suit to unlock it for repair, but the spine injury rendered that function useless.

'Almost,' murmured the Hunter, 'just keep still, and I'll be done in no time.'

'I am still, you bloody dimwit!' The Battlemaster nearly exploded in mock anger as he bellowed the words, prompting a grin on many faces, and a snigger from Caius and Korventhor. 'I'm paralysed from the neck down! How the hell can I move?' If I could, you'd already be...'

'...marching out the airlock when we got back, we know.' Caius interrupted rather loudly, drowning out the rest of the darkly humored threat before he turned back to his own patient. Applying another syringe filled with numbing agents and antibiotics to her arm, Caius returned his gaze to the incision he'd made in Ellie's wrist.

It was an ugly sight, having a dozen or so bone fragments implanted into one's flesh. The Sentient, and it's cruel intelligence, had seen to that, and Caius shuddered at the thought of fighting such a beast without the adaptations of the Shadow Guard. It was quite a feat that she still breathed, although she was doing so shallowly, as she screwed her eyes shut throughout his work.

He sighed at that. While he carried sedatives and the like to induce sleep or even a coma for the duration of an operation, they were far too strong to be used on a human being. They'd more than likely kill her within a few minutes. Any that could have been compatible with a human, well, they had either been used up when he'd tried to save those wounded in the sniper attack on the Jackson command center, or they were still aboard the _Armageddon_. Thus, he had to content himself with using the weaker, smaller scale anesthesias that prevented the majority of the pain being read by her brain. Hopefully.

'Not much more,' he tried to sooth her, but the helmet's impassive broadcast systems defeated the attempt. She didn't really respond to his words, apart from screwing her eyes all the more tighter as the blade went back to work. All the while, Joel held her good hand, whispering to her throughout the whole procedure.

_For a man who killed everyone she loved_, he thought grimly, _he didn't do too bad for a father_.

His own had been impassive; even more so than the helmet made them all sound. He'd neglected his duties as a father, teaching his sons that their father was the Great Father beyond the mortal realm, and that he, like all parents, were only means to bring them into the world of the living. Hence there was no real connection; only service in his name.

Bastard, Caius had told himself, and he had promised himself that if he had ever had kids, he'd do better.

The human invasion of Lementus III had put an end to those dreams. It had also taken his genetic father, and for that, Caius could be proud of him. He made up for his shortcomings as a father by being a great soldier. But even that didn't protect him when the human Titans leveled Ajax Temptemptus, and buried it's defenders under it's own ruins.

He finished removing the final bone fragment, before he applied a sizable drop of suspension fluid into the wound. Without any armor to act as a cast, Caius had elected to use the Guard's temporary first aid methods to keep the shattered bone from causing extensive damage, since it did, in effect, fill any organic space it was applied to, all the while acting to cushion it, and prevent exertion in combat damaging the wound further. Quickly, he sealed the incision once more by laser, setting the cavity to fill for the suspension fluid, lest it multiply rapidly until it 'leaked' from the wound.

'It's done,' he whispered, as he tore a piece of binding from the medical kit to use as a sling, 'It's done.'

He finished tying the knot, before he rose back to his feet. As he did so, Joel raised his head to mutter his thanks, but those green eyes did not open to even acknowledge his presence. Only tears.

Caius didn't comment on it. He knew that she'd seen something not meant for the eyes of living.

'So ... you saw her again?'

'For the last time, yes. It was her. Full eagle insignia, wings outstretched to the heavens. No doubt; it was her.'

Leandros leaned back against the one intact desk of the greenhouse, careful to not put too much weight on it. Humans and their bloody flawed designs. It was a wonder the whole place hadn't already come crashing to the ground. All it took was a little nudge, usually in the form of Korventhor and his extensive knowledge of demolitions.

'Sounds like she's become a guardian angel,' he muttered, remembering the face of the Stormcaller he once, and still, loved. Perfect memory was indeed both a gift and curse. Every moment shared, up until the moment he'd touched down planetside on Exelon, and seen her dying in Aurelius' arms. The two had stayed there until her passing, defending both their ground and their Fallen with their lives.

'Sounds like it indeed,' Aurelius replied, before he bit off the last word mid sentence, as he winced in pain at Caius' tinkering with his metal spine. The feeling of his body was returning to him now, and along with it came the pain of falling from the top of a building without any working device capable of slowing that downfall.

Plus there was also the added weight of Caius on his back.

'What do you make of it, Caius?' Leandros voiced the question, prompting Caius to look up from his work, and be rewarded with a sidelong glare from the Battlemaster. He'd been waiting long enough.

'I don't know enough about the Storm, or the late Master of the Storm for that matter,' he replied carefully as he bent back over to finish his repairs, 'to know if she's following us wherever we go in our battles. But what I do know, is that you should never do that again. Possession is a real threat, particularly without someone to act as your failsafe.'

He directed the last accusation at the Battlemaster, and Aurelius simply rolled his eyes, although under the helmet, no one saw the act, and even if it had been removed, they would still be buried in two inches of ash.

'Not quite sure if I like the concept of someone standing by to shoot me where it wouln't kill me to stop a pissed of spirit having some down time. Anyway, there wasn't any other choice.' Aurelius muttered, though he said it loud enough for Caius to be able to hear it. 'He'd already gotten to her.'

'What?' asked Caius abruptly, stopping his work on the spine again. While he was annoyed once more at Caius' vulnerability to distractions, Aurelius was suddenly worried by his own words. He hadn't actually seen if Daniel had delivered the Sentient's unique strain of the Cordyceps into the girl's bloodstream, or not.

'He got close to her; close enough to break her hand,' he elaborated, before he asked the glaring question. 'What? Was she bitten?'

Just then, across the room, as he wiped away the ash that still covered the girl in his arms, Joel uncovered the sunken, bloody wound upon his girl's shoulder.

A bite.


	15. Hell got tired of waiting

_Wipe all trace of your enemy's triumphs. Eliminate their entire existence from living memory. That is a true victory.  
Battlemaster Cyrus, 42nd Shadow Guard, on purging Landex Isle of xenos._

'Oh shit,' Aurelius muttered. His eyes remained riveted on the clean, curved line of bloodied indentations beneath the torn red fabric. There was no mistaking them; bite marks; the same that had marked Carnax's corpse when they'd found him dead in the bowels of the Outcast, and the same that had marked Livanus and Dominus for a slow descent into madness.

Silence seemed to fall upon the shattered greenhouse like a muffling blanket, dulling every sound to the outside, as the Battlemaster contemplated his failure.

Marius, Lucius, Claudius, Remus, even Decius.

All gone. For nothing.

The hiss of steel on steel tore through the shroud of silence, as a blade slid from it's restraining sheath once more.

'Needs must,' Leandros muttered as he started toward the two crouching humans, a wicked blade held loosely in his hand.

'What the hell do you think you are doing, Guardsman?' Demanded Caius, rising to stop his impulsive friend. Even as he placed a restraining hand on the Blademaster's shoulder, Caius felt something radiate there that shouldn't have; a near burning hatred, and desire for blood.

It should have warned him from the blow.

Stunned by the sudden, savage hook to his temple, Caius stumbled back, releasing Leandros to continue onward to his bloody goal.

Only to come face to face with his Battlemaster.

With a final grunt of effort, mainly relying on Korventhor to aid his weakened legs, Aurelius rose to confront his burning ally. Part of the whole damn matter was his own fault anyway. He'd regretted the moment he'd mentioned Serena to his old friend in the presence of the two humans with a vengeance. He'd only done so in the past on one occasion; also amidst the Excelon campaign, after the late Master of Storm's passing, when the final assault on the Primary spires was launched.

The results had been, bloody to say the least.

'Get out of my way, Aurelius,' Leandros hissed darkly, his eyes flaring beneath the matt helm.

'Stand down, Leandros,' the Battlemaster commanded, 'I'm not letting you place some concluded feud with an entire race above the mission's priorities.'

'This is for the mission!' The Blademaster retorted vehemently, 'She's now a threat; the same as the bastard you nearly killed yourself taking down. That one was crippled; you think you could kill her when she's turned, and brings the tide down on our heads?'

'The mission is to get her back alive, you idiot!' Aurelius spat, 'You can't synthesize a vaccine from cut up pieces, can you? Now get your damn head out of vengeance's arse and stand down, Blademaster. Serena had her vengeance.'

Leandros only scoffed at the words, venting his disagreement. 'You think you can trust her to fight on until we're clear? They turn in one day. We have two to get clear of this hell hole and call Spectre for an evac.'

'There is a chance of a two day incubation...'

'You forget what humans are, Aurelius.' Leandros muttered harshly, 'selfish jumped up pieces of shit that will gladly take everything to live another undeserved day. Even the life of a brother...'

'Fine then.' Aurelius replied, cutting off the Blademaster with the unexpected change in heart, before he continued on, 'Kill her. But if you're willing to accept vengeance for the dead over the lives of the living, then prove it. Kill me. Then you can have your vengeance, on two souls who'll remain ignorant of the sins of their forefathers.'

For a moment, the sharpened blade drew back to strike down the obstacle to revenge, and Aurelius briefly wondered if he'd pushed his friend too far. But then he saw a familiar light behind that helm, as resenting logic reasserted itself once more behind the Blademaster's eyes, and the berserk fury that had once been unleashed on Excelon abated. Slowly, painfully, the armored gauntlet replaced the blade into it's hungry sheath, though it remained locked in a tight fist. Raising his voice so it carried clearly to the two wary humans, Leandros delivered one last verbal strike, sating the fading vengeance in his heart for Serena.

'I swear, on the Great Father,' he thundered, an accusing finger pointed beyond the Battlemaster's obstinate form into green eyes, 'If you bring threat to my brothers in any damn way, I'll have your fucking head, girl. I swear.'

With that, he stormed about, and barged outside, fury contort across the carapace that layered his fuming body.

* * *

'I'm sorry you had to go through that,' Aurelius murmured, taking a precarious standing against another convenient pillar.

'What the hell is his problem?' Ellie asked nervously, and the Battlemaster had to acknowledge the fact she probably wasn't having the best day of her life. In a few short hours, she'd learnt the bitter truth behind her old man, had her estimated 'human' life reduced to one or two days if the _Armageddon_ was unable to extract them once they made contact with Spectre, had her dominant hand snapped, and seen a tormenting ghost of the past. And to cap, now she had to contend with the very real possibility of losing her head to an angry Guardsman if she looked at him wrongly.

A bad day by any account.

'Don't judge him too harshly,' Aurelius countered softly, 'at least until you know his past trials.'

'Which are?'

Aurelius stopped right there, sensing he'd gone too far. An invitation into their forgotten past was the last thing he'd meant to offer in apology. But, cut off this far from friendly lines, trust, no matter how bitter, might be the only thing keeping them alive by the end of this forsaken journey. If he remained tight lipped, he didn't place a midnight escape attempt beyond Joel, and a grudging understanding would be better than a nervous uncertainly any day.

It was time for the bitter truth.

* * *

'Humanity's history,' Aurelius began, 'isn't exactly what you'd expect. Apart from that written after three thousand years ago. Before that, Humanity was actually a marvel of technological advancement; a race taking it's first steps out into the void of space, beyond it's own star.'

Aurelius halted his tale for a moment, recollecting the painful memories of loss once more before he continued on.

'Wasn't long before they encountered the Saar, on Megrex XII. Proud race, probably too proud for their own damn good. Their tribes weren't any real match when the terraforming began. Pumping Oxygen into the atmosphere,' he quickly explained, 'to a level at which human life could be sustained. Human life, that is.'

'What happened to the Saar?' Ellie asked, uncertain if she'd just pronounced that right. It was unnerving to hear the soldier disavow history with such a confidence, and she couldn't help but acknowledge the nagging feeling in her gut that this story wouldn't end well.

'Destroyed,' Aurelius replied simply, as if the genocide of a race was an everyday occurance, 'Most of them suffocated in the new environment; the rest were just massacred in the short war that followed. The first of many, in fact. 1 year later, and 15 dead worlds in their wake, you arrived on my home world's doorstep. Lementus III.'

A cold chill had fallen over the ruined greenhouse, as Ellie and Joel nervously exchanged glances, finally scratching the surface of the hatred that ran deep in the hearts of the 23rd, whilst the Guard themselves brutally reminisced their bloody past.

'Thankfully,' Aurelius put lightheartedly, 'we also had an oxygen based atmosphere, so we didn't die. Immediately, at least.'

'We took effectively ancient weaponry against a modern military,' Aurelius went on, 'and we paid for it in blood. The blood of brothers and sisters. It was only thanks to the timely arrival of the 10th and 22nd Fleets that we were spared, in a crude manner of speaking.'

'You see,' he explained, 'the Council may be composed with a bunch of soft upstart pricks, but they could still recognize a threat. 15 worlds arbitrarily exterminated isn't the thing that slides easily. And like all threats to life, the sentence for such death.'

'1 million; that was how many of us were left in the wake of the Lementus campaign. From a species that once numbered three billion, it's a long way to fall.'

Throughout the course of the unforgiving tale, Ellie remained speechless, as she tried to begin to understand the blood soaked madness that had nearly claimed the vengeful Blademaster. Even the Cordyceps outbreak hadn't driven humanity to such an endangered state, and she couldn't help but imagine the brutal genocide that had befallen the scarred survivors of the 23rd. However, one egging question on her mind couldn't help but burst her silence.

'But that was what? Three thousand years ago? What the hell happened...'

'What followed was a purge, Ellie.' Aurelius muttered the word like an envenomed blade, before he explained what was undoubtedly the bloodiest protocol amongst the Council's doings. 'The annihilation of almost all life deemed a threat. It took us nearly two dozen years to roll back the defenses of humanity's new empire, but we did it. Then, when we had humanity dying with it's back to a wall, we were ordered to stand down.'

He gave her another quick glance, examining the inquisitive streak in the girl, even in such a dismal time. Of course, knowledge was power. 'The same protocol,' he put simply, 'that empowers death also empowers life. A race can't be driven to extinction without a second chance.'

'We left the minimum sustainable population on Earth with their memories wiped, and left, hoping you'd take another path, other than one of conquest and genocide.'

Ellie swallowed nervously once more. Her of books had told her enough about humanity's history, even before the apocalypse, to know they'd unknowingly failed their tests.

'And what would have happened if we took the same path again?'

The Battlemaster eyed Joel with a blank stare.

'A second purge, but with one alteration; annihilation to a man. No survivors.'

'Has that ever happened before?' Ellie asked, trying to garner some hope for their fallen species.

'Once, yes. Not too long ago in fact; last world to that purge fell only two years ago. The Excelon sector.'

'Who was it?'

Another slanted tilt of the Battlemaster's head told her his face wore a humorless grin once more.

'Take a look in the mirror.'

* * *

'We screwed up. That's all there really is to say on the matter of leaving out a planet for a purge. Stupid...' Aurelius trailed off, cursing whoever came to mind as he tried to place a face on whichever navigator had deemed the Forbidden Zone 'non negotiable by human vessels', and thus refused to clear a costly expedition into the Star cluster that included Excelon's five now-desolate worlds.

'Three thousand years to prepare for a war on an unsuspecting Council. And we never saw it coming until three whole systems fell off the comm grid. After that,' the Guardsman concluded, 'It was one long journey into hell; twenty years of battle. Dislodging them from world after world, just like last time. Only, we didn't count on their new tactics.'

'What did they do?'

'Victory at any cost.' Aurelius replied, depressingly sober as he muttered the words. 'Individual life was forfeit, if the payoff was large enough.'

'Suicide attacks; selfless sacrifice. Yeah, that all marked twenty years of shit. Probably hit us the worse when they detonated the ridgeline.'

Perhaps it was the mere need to unload his heaviest burdens that he'd added that last line, but regardless, it provoked another inquisitive que to carry on.

'Sigma,' Aurelius went on, 'was the most heavily fortified chain of defenses on Excelon II. Cost us hundreds to take that ridge, and when we finally pushed them back, they detonated a Massive Ordnance Air Blast underneath the line. Serena, Califax, Helena, Tacita, and I were the only ones left by the time the flames died down. The last of the Stormcallers.'

He earned a wary sidelong stare at that, as the sight of the ethereal demon creased Ellie's mind once more, although in his current state, the Battlemaster couldn't care less with the memory of the Fallen so strong once again.

'That was at least until a counter attack hit the Ridge. Five of us against a world.' He simply shook his head in mock disbelief. 'Of course we died. It's only because Corinthus descended with the entirety of the 23rd to pull us out that I'm standing here right now. But, it was too late for the others.'

For a moment, he could almost see the greenhouse before him disintegrate back into the hellish firefight for the barren ridge. He could almost watch his brothers and sisters fall once more. Even Serena, as she subcumbed to her wounds, even as he and Leandros' berserk Guardsmen had come to her aid too late.

'But hey,' he tried weakly, 'The past is past. As I said; all we can do is forge the future.'

Even as the words left his mouth, an all too familiar distorted croak returned into the background of his thought, as the Infected drew in once more, forgetting their new found fear for ghosts.

'Well?' The Battlemaster offered, 'Shall we?'

* * *

The creature stumbled forward another two meters, before it collapsed in a pool of it's own blood, as it tried to ineffectively stauch the gaping wound in it's vocal cords.

Creeping forward, past his most recent kill, Caius let the darkness conceal him once more, dragging the black cloak about him, hiding him from hostile eyes as he stepped nimbly across the open ground that separated him from his next piece of adequate cover.

Not a sound reached the pair of clickers further up the street, as they continued to shamble onward, in the vague direction of the greenhouse the Guard had long since abandoned.

'Alright,' Caius whispered into the helmet's comm bead, 'you're clear to move.'

He opened up and closed and outstretched hand in quick succession at the same time, leaving no margin for communication errors. Like he'd just flicked a switch, the shadows in the ruined house at his back came to life, and soon, armored spectres were flitering across the road; quietly, calm and unrushed.

As he raised his Judgement to cover the main road, Castor dropped down beside his Master of Shadows, un shouldering his own rifle in the same motion that took him to the concrete ground.

'Hurry up,' Caius muttered to Aurelius, who had just begun his crossing with Ellie concealed under the billowing cloak, 'you got more on the way.'

The Guardsman's pace quickened slightly, although it was far from a sprint, as the time honed lessons of stealth returned to the Battlemaster.

_Movement is the bitch that'll give you away,_ Fornus had taught them long ago, over the 23rd's charred homeworld. _Patience is the virtue._

The time honed lesson proved true once again, as Aurelius landed lightly beside his two brothers in the shallow ditch at the base of the next structure, leaving Ellie to abandon the cloak's protective shielding. Concealed in the uneven shadows, the next horde of Infected never bothered to turn aside to check the side road for meals as they ambled onward for the most recent battlefield.

'Alright, move it, you sorry lot,' Aurelius ordered down the comm link. Meanwhile, as the train of shadows continued across the open ground, Caius slipped up to the corner of the wall, hoping for a better view on the main street.

Instead, he was blessed with the full visual decay of a surprisingly muted clicker. Forcing a calm he certainly did not possess, he slowly crept his head back into cover, until he was hidden from sight once more. Still though, his 'recon' hadn't placed the greatest faith in the next hurdle of their stealthed journey.

'How's it look?'

Caius just gave Leandros a side long glance before he replied, 'nothing good. Clickers, and more infected further up ahead; too many to go unnoticed.'

'Best estimate on numbers?'

There was a brief pause, followed by a depressive sigh.

'One clicker right around the corner, and the rest are about six meters, five meters minimum.'

'So what's the plan, Shadow?'

Caius slumped against the wall for a moment, as he wracked his mind. Despite his position as Battlemaster, Aurelius typically trusted Caius with any approach that favoured shadows and stealth to hellfire, and with ammunition stretched, this was certainly the time for one.

The wall at the Master of Shadows' back gave him his answer.

'Leandros,' Caius began, 'do us a favour and gut the clicker. Quietly,' he added hasitly, as the Blademaster began drawing his remaining weapons.

There a slight huff of annoyance, but otherwise, Leandros remained silent as he slipped past the small knot of Guardsmen to the wall's corner.

'In the meanwhile,' he addressed the remaining Guardsmen and humans, ' I say we go vertical.'

* * *

Clambering up with a pistol drawn, Caius placed his first step onto the roof with infinite care, until he was satisfied that a lack of maintenance over twenty odd years was not going to send him plummeting on an uncalled tour of the structure's interior.

'Alright, I think we're clear.'

'Copy that Caius,' Aurelius replied over the comms, 'secure the line and we'll be on the way up.'

An animalistic grunt of effort cut in briefly over the communication channels, as the Blademaster sank another sharpened blade into the hapless clicker, eliminating the only possible witness to a potentially noisy climb, before a familiar hand gripped the edge of the roof.

Pulling up the hunter, Caius slanted his head off to the side, silently signalling Castor to cover the company once more, although, from the scuffle of movement below, all was not well.

* * *

'Fuck, are you guys trying to kill us?' Ellie gasped, as she withdrew a bloodied hand from the dropline Caius had left for their ascent. After Castor, she'd reached out to take hold of the wire, only to snatch her hand back when a wound had inexplicably opened up across her palm. A wound that matched the width of the guilty drop line that still swung in the air as a result of the scout's recent movements.

'Well, that was originally the plan,' Korventhor put carelessly, earning another scowl from the pissed off girl. The extensive failsafe measures of the 23rd had only been introduced during the Excelon campaign, after several incidences of humans utilizing Guard technology, and as a result, more dead brothers. Hence, after the campaign's conclusion, a sizeable amount of the 23rd's equipment had undergone modification to permit exclusive use to those wearing the mark of the Shadows.

In the case of the drop lines, that meant a lot of one way serrations, similar to a fish's scales if they were sharpened for combat, that would shred a man's hands with ease if he tried to use it.

'How the hell do you even use that?' she spat painfully, wiping her wet palm across her jeans. Leandros just held out his armored gauntlets in reply, before he decided to taunt her further with his own quick ascent up the devilish rope.

'So how are we meant to get up there?' Joel put asked as he pulled a bandage from his backpack to attend to the new wound.

'We could carry you,' Korventhor replied straight faced.

'Really?' asked Joel asked disbelievingly, raising an eyebrow at the steadfast Guardsman. After everything he'd seen of them, it hardly seemed the professional approach.

'No, not really,' the Master of Ordnance replied, grinning from ear to ear as he took ahold of the metallic line to rejoin his brothers.

'You could walk,' put in Titus, although he promptly shut up when those green eyes blazed red into his own. Evidently, someone wasn't happy with legging it past a few dozen Infected. Ordinarily, he wouldn't have backed down, if he could have actually defended himself. But they needed her alive, and she'd already proven she was more than adept with that switchblade, so his only response was to grab the swaying line himself.

Ellie was about to make another barbed comment about the Guard's lack of sympathy, before an odd hiss and click disrupted her thoughts. Rounding about, fearing the infected, instead she came face to face with Aurelius, as he removed the black metallic belt on his waist.

'We're never going to get underway with you squabbling lot, so I'll make it easy: turn around, and shut up.'

Rather surprised at the sudden command in his voice, Ellie did as she was told, until two hands went under her arms and snapped the metal strip about her own waist, and one moved to the belt's front.

Far too close for comfort.

'Don't you fucking touch me, you...' She tried to squirm out, but an iron grip arrested her good hand, trapping her in place.

'Just shut up, I'm trying to keep you alive, so can you do with a minute of silence?'

Abruptly, Aurelius appeared before her, whilst his right thumb connected with a slight indentation in the belt's connecting buckle.

'Geno-identification,' the Battlemaster spoke mechanically, 'Ally of Corvus Aurelius, Battlemaster, 23rd Shadow Guard. Acknowledge.'

In short order, a small light on the belt flashed green twice, before it plunged back into darkness, and Aurelius let out a pent up breath. At least the untested theory of disarming the failsafes worked. If it hadn't, well, the acid laden barbs that lined the interior of the belt, along with the multitude of directional explosives would leave them with a lot of cleaning up.

'Alright then Ellie,' Aurelius piped up cheerfully, 'This next bit might hurt.'

'What are you...'

She didn't finish the enquiry, when a sudden stab of pain tore into her lower back, and she bit her lip painfully, determined to keep their presence unnoticed, although she swore that by the end of things, she'd have the Battlemaster's fucking head.

'Spinal interface,' the Guardsman explained. 'Makes things a lot easier.'

_And a lot more painful, you piece of shit_, Ellie thought, although she was in too much pain to spit the curse. In the haze of neural feedback, she didn't register Aurelius lock the accursed line on her side until her arm brushed against the damnable thing once more, cutting open another wound, though this one was just a graze.

'Right,' the Battlemaster thought to himself once more, before he mumbled a set of orders to Octavius.

'Guardsman,' he commanded, 'Turn your tac belt and gauntlets over to Joel. Now.'

The last black clad figure on the ground muttered his own complaints as he began removing his own equipment, although Ellie couldn't hear most of it under the muffling helmet.

What she was provided with was a first view of what lay beneath the Battlemaster's armor, as he sent the neural signal to his left hand's gauntlet to detach.

Another hiss of pistons later, and the carapace dropped away, revealing a skeletal, metallic hand beneath.

* * *

'What the fuck man?' Not too surprisingly, Ellie recoiled in shock as she saw the truth behind the armored form even as Aurelius offered out the gauntlet for her good hand.

'Lost it on Diox, hunting xenos.' he sighed, 'I'm still part flesh and bone. It's just a bit hard to get through three thousand years of battle completely intact.'

'Speaking of which, how old are you?'

'Three thousand, thirty two years a month ago,' he grinned. 'Augmentics keep us immune to aging, but not high explosives.'

With some nervousness, Ellie took the offered armor piece. Like something out of her science fiction universes, it instinctively locked around her hand, before another searing jet of pain stabbed into her flesh. By the time she looked up, her hand was a black armored glaive that winked green at her twice, before it's light died.

'Alright, you're good to go.' The Battlemaster announced. 'Get climbing.'

* * *

Not for the first time, Ellie rubbed the top of her left hand against her bloodied jeans, in an attempt to rid herself of that damn tingling feeling left by the thin synchronization needle that had bored through her flesh to reach her nervous system. The gauntlets and belts had already been returned to their rightful owners and now they were making their way over the abandoned roof tops of Salt Lake City, constantly on the look out for the ever present Infected. Or rather, Caius and Castor were.

She had to give the two some credit, as they moved well ahead of the team, dropping unavoidable threats with blades and solid, suppressed hellfire rounds, and marking avoidable ones for the rest of the company, giving them some breathing space.

Almost as good as Joel, she thought ruefully.

It had taken it's time, but, she'd found forgiveness for the old man. After all they'd been through, she'd have done the same.

Then a gunshot rang out, and Joel tumbled to the side, onto the hard concrete.

'Fireflies!' someone cried out, before the air was alive with hissing, flying rounds, and the loud cracks of small arms fire. It was joined in quick succession by the repeated spit of hellfire and curses, as the Guard turned their rage on their oldest pure foes.

Firing her constant pistol in the approximate direction of the shot's origin, she stumbled through the firestorm, trying to make her way to Joel, until a strong grip dragged her back into cover.

'Stay down, dammit,' Koventhor hissed, before he abandoned the dividing wall between himself and the bulletstorm, as he unleashed a torrent of ear shattering, unsuppressed fire. A series of detonations in the opposing structure's walls marked the Guardsman's unaimed fury, at least until an explosion of red stained the supermarket's side.

With the Guardsman's back to her though, Ellie scrambled out once more for the still body that lay in a pooling puddle of red liquid. A few shots crashed into the wall just beside her, spraying her with dust and debris, but she kept moving until she reached Joel.

'Come on, you gotta get up,' she begged him, trying to drag the heavy limp body behind some cover. It was then that she saw the source of the wound; a clean tear in his grizzled throat that pulsed with blood.

'Joel!' she screamed, fighting against his weight with her one good hand, 'get the fuck up! Come on!'

A heavy hand gripped her shoulder, snapping her out of her thoughts.

At first, she nearly punched the guilty soldier for dragging her away from her old man, until the Guardsman moved past her, grabbing Joel under his arms and pulling him behind another solid piece of cover; this time a ruined air conditioning unit.

Sliding down beside the unconscious man, Caius dropped his rifle as he tore open the med kit, desperately trying to staunch and clamp the pulsing vein, whilst another torrent of fire lit up the street as the Guard returned the hells of their past on their ancient foes.

* * *

'Keep up the damn fire,' Aurelius' voice sounded over the comm bead, 'Leandros come in. Where the hell are you?'

Right here, the Blademaster thought, although he didn't voice the reply, with a pair of Fireflies literally only a meter from his location.

Slamming his foot against the table that separated the two parties, and knocking to incompetent pair off balance, Leandros nimbly vaulted over the overturned obstacle, before he tore apart the two fools with far lesser grace.

Having already ghosted his way across the street to reach the Firefly position, Leandros leapt at the beleaguered firing line with a vengeance, Talons and blades unsheathed for war.

The first man that came into his reach fell back a moment later, clutching his torn stomach, whilst the Blademaster set upon the rest of the humans. Tearing a blade through calf muscles, he dragged the next unfortunate into the sights of the survivors, before he let another pair of throwing blades fly into the chests of two others. Dropping the bullet ridden shield, he covered the ground to the last man in a second, although it was quickly proven to be without a purpose, as he collapsed forward into the Blademaster's exposed blades, the back of his head missing, courtesy of a hellfire.

Then he saw him.

The same brutally scarred face that had marched proudly from a farm that burned with two brothers of the 23rd now rallied the last remnants of the Firefly bastards into a final effort, relighting the conflict in a renewed storm of fire.

'Green is mine,' he whispered down the link, 'the bastard is mine.'

Even as he dashed into the Fireflies, headless corpses tumbled back around him, as aimed fire covered the vengeful Guardsman. Two honed blades hammered themselves into the hearts of the lead troopers, whilst the last balanced throwing blade pinned itself into Marcus' kneecap. In the time it took him to scream and fall to the ground, every other Firefly had begun to fall as well, only completely deprived of life; by either Leandros' blades, or hellfire. Only once the last had crumpled to the side, his heart torn from his warm corpse, did the blood stained Blademaster turn on the lead Firefly. Drawing up his side arm, Green unleashed a thunder of fire in quick succession at the Guardsman, before a hellfire tore his firing hand off at the wrist.

'I always need to bail your sorry ass out, don't I?'

Leandros didn't bother replying his Battlemaster's stark comment, as he felt his side. There were two wounds there; leaking black blood along his brutalized armor, but they were far from life threatening.

All that mattered now was vengence.

'You can't kill me,' Green hissed at the approaching Guardsman, 'we're the light in the darkness. The only hope of reaching the dawn. You'll...'

'You forget, human,' Leandros grinned, as stamped down hard on the Firefly's leg, snapping bone, 'I am a Shadow. I am the darkness you fear.'

The man cried out as a blade tore through his remaining hand, severing tendons and nerves, before he was seized by the collar and dragged up to face the Blademaster. Then, without a word of warning, the Guardsman tore off his helmet.

Even through the clouded madness at the core of the Firefly's mind, what Marcus saw made him scream in terror.

'I should gut you right now for what you've done,' the Guardsman hissed, before another savage grin split his scarred, torn face.

'But death is too easy.'

Relocking the black helm over his head once more, he tore the blades free from bloodied flesh, and abandoned the Firefly to screaming hordes of Infected that were closing in; drawn by the sound of battle and death.

Returning to the squad, Leandros arrived just in time for Korventhor to set off the charges. Set along the segment of the roof they'd just traversed, they collapsed a good section of the raised flooring, and sent a dozen howling mad men to their demise.

'Get going!' Caius cried once more, directing the squad along the ruined passageway. As more bodies crashed after them; along the roof and down the street, Octavius and Ellie hauled the wounded man to his feet, dragging him into the dark of the next structure, followed in short order by Titus and Castor. The last ones through, Aurelius, Korventhor and Caius let off one final brutal burst of fire each before they plunged back into shadow. Even above the hellish thunder of the final collapse, as Korventhor dropped the final portion of the roof back down to ground level, a single drawn out scream pierced the air, until it was drowned out at last by the triumphant infected, as they swarmed about their crippled prey.

'Go in peace,' Leandros muttered at the Firefly's demise, before he let a scowl break through his stoic pretense. The bastard had it coming ever since his actions sent brothers of the 23rd to join the Fallen, and the Blademaster never had tried to keep up any pretense of being a saint.

'And rot in hell, bastard.'

* * *

'I'm not liking where this is going Caius,' Aurelius warned the Guardsman.

'Me neither, Battlemaster,' he responded, 'but it may be for the best.'

Aurelius nearly barked at him in reply. After losing the infected in the confines of the flooded basement, the need to fully address Joel's wounds had finally taken priority. After some time, and a lot of blood lost, Caius had finally managed to staunch the flood of red blood, although Joel remained laid on the improvised operating table, weak from blood loss. Thankfully, the round had missed his jugular by millimeters, but still; the lifeblood he'd lost was phenomenal. Now, the pair of senior Guardsmen stood some distance from the fortified room that had doubled as a surgery, discussing the fate of Caius' patient.

'You have the damn stimulants,' he hissed over the comms, 'then use them.'

Only risking a sidelong glance at the wounded man, about a dozen meters back down the passage, still lying on the side, Caius glanced back at the Battlemaster, and the syringe in his own hand.

'I told you, I only have one.'

'What are you, a hoarder? Get him back on his feet, and let's get out of this damn place, before more of them show up. He ain't going anywhere without becoming a liability, unless you pump him up. Get him on his feet; we move in ten.'

'We're going to need it later, when the bite catches up with us.'

Aurelius suddenly stopped, sensing the implied message there. Of course, in the heat of the moment, he'd forgotten the Sentient's bite. When that began to wrestle for control of the girl's mind, she'd need to draw on nearly every reserve to keep moving, and fighting off the parasite in her head. The stimulants would aid her in the effort of reaching the _Armageddon _alive, but as Caius had just pointed out, he'd used nearly every one of the human-compatible stimulants back at Jackson, healing up those who'd paid the price for defending their homes.

But if they left Joel to his own devices, chances were, he wouldn't be getting up anytime soon without some kind of boost, having lost that much blood.

'I've given him what I could already spare, Aurelius,' the Guardsmen told him, 'but it's not enough. What would you have me do?'

The syringe hovered in his hands.

'It's either him, or her.'

Aurelius sighed at the decision. Brutal as it may have been though, there was no real choice, with an asset of such a value. The only one that existed was if they would leave him for the Infected when they came, or if they'd give him the final mercy before moving on.

Finally, he gave a brief nod to Caius.

'Priorities first. Same as always. Take them on,' he whispered, 'I'll catch up.'

* * *

They returned to the rest of the team in silence, apart from the irregular splashes of water Aurelius generated as he moved onward. Caius threw them a quick flick of the wrist, that signaled them it was time to move on, and leave the hellhole behind. Even as he moved up the prone man, he could make out a voice that tore at his heart.

'Don't you fucking die on me, Joel,' Ellie whispered softly, her head buried in the still man's arms, 'don't.'

'It's time to go, Ellie,' Caius interrupted gently. Dropping a cold hand onto her shoulder, he head the stricken girl from the scene, whispering to her that it would be alright. Even as he did so though, he managed one last glance at the Battlemaster.

_Are you absolute you want to do this?_

Aurelius only stared at the Master of Shadows with hard eyes, until Caius finally broke contact, drawing the girl away from her father figure as he did so.

With Ellie's eyes shielded by armored bodies that were soon trailing out of sight into the dark, Aurelius hobbled to the wall to support himself, before he drew the pistol at his side. The gunshot wound to his thigh was beginning to nag at him, as the adrenaline rush of combat wore off, and the sober knowledge of what was to come replaced it.

'He whose time has come,' he announced quietly, so the words only carried to Joel's ears alone, 'give him peace.'

Fearful eyes met his own as he leveled the bolt pistol to the man's head, and the Guardsman was forced to turn from the scene. It felt strange, he reflected briefly, to feel regret in taking a human's life. He should have been nearly jubilant, after what the bastards had done. No, all he felt was that he was committing a mercy killing.

Something worthy of a brother whose time was up.

'You'll be with your daughter soon.'

The gunshot cracked, plunging the basement into silence.

* * *

**Things never get easier do they?**

**Hey guys, sorry about a late posting. Next chapter will be slightly delayed for two week's time(2nd November), so appologies once more for that.**


	16. Into the dark

_Death is only the beginning of a whole new world of suffering. So don't you die on me.  
Serena, Master of the Storm, whilst defending a wounded Aurelius on the Sigma ridgeline_

Startled, Aurelius rounded about to the sudden unsuppressed crack, his own finger still resting lightly on the trigger's edge, unpulled.

'Don't you fucking dare,' Ellie hissed, the pistol in her hands aimed solely at the Battlemaster's head, 'Get the fuck away from him right now.'

'Sorry, Aurelius,' Caius sounded into Aurelius' head, 'but bloody hell, the bitch shot me.'

'Still no excuse, Guardsman,' the Battlemaster replied, carefully raising the pistol still clutched in his hand away from Joel's head, in a sign of at least temporary peace. 'Ellie, why don't you...'

'Fuck that; get away from him.'

She waved the raised pistol to the side vehemently once more, and in that moment, and perhaps with some common sense and hints from the Storm, Aurelius knew this was no bluff. She wouldn't hesitate to pull that trigger and rob the 23rd of another brother.

Several hastened splashes behind her, several other dark figures moved in, although they too soon found themselves at the wrong end of that pistol, though, to think of it, there wasn't much harm she could do, with one or more opponents on either side of her, if they didn't need to take her alive.

'Stay back,' she warned, swinging the pistol to and fro between her many targets. None of them returned the gesture, and an unease had fallen upon the veterans. In all their years, live capture had never been an objective; only complete annihilation.

Now that they had to subjugate an armed target without lethal force, there was a certain level of uncertainty in the Guard, as they circled the armed girl, waiting for any opportunity.

Then, like a thunderclap, the impasse was broken; as Ellie's back turned in the Blademaster's direction, Leandros leapt for her, blade already in hand.

They crashed into the foul water together, although it was hardly fair, since the carapace of the Guardsman's armor, though intended to be lightweight, nearly crushed Ellie under the sudden unexpected assault.

She thrashed back with her good hand, hammering against the Guardsman's head with the pistol's hilt, desperately trying to reach her switchblade with her other hand, although it's broken state made the task excruciating to say the least.

She let out a cry of pain as the restraining sling tore, and, fighting through the blaze of pain, she fumbled for the concealed blade, even as the water about her lapped into her eyes clouding vision.

Then, placing a solid grip about her left hand, and a choking hold around her neck, Ellie was torn out of the water, into the furious Guardsman's eyes.

'I told you what would happen if you harmed a brother,' he hissed darkly.

Before he was met by any resistance, from either Ellie, his surrounding Guardsmen, or the wounded Joel, the Blademaster threw his whole weight onto the struggling girl, plunging her beneath the surface, and watched on in satisfaction as the water erupted in a violent torrent of bubbles that marked Ellie's shortening supply of oxygen.

Serena's face burning in his mind, he pushed down harder, ignoring the girl's weakening motions until an arm locked across his neck.

Relieved without warning from the mounting weight on her neck, Ellie burst to the surface, gasping for air, before she realized the Blademaster was stood, with another armored gauntlet locked around his own throat in a chokehold.

Korventhor struggled to hold back his enraged friend for a second, before he realized too late that he was dealing with an expert in close combat.

A single, perfectly aimed blade mounted on the Blademaster's elbow ground into his side, and he instinctively let go of of his furious friend.

Before Leandros could finish his bloodyminded task though, Aurelius, with Titius and Octavius at his side, barreled into him, and between the three of them, dragged him aside to calm down, whilst Castor and Caius dropped down to check a breathless Ellie.

Only once he was satisfied Ellie was only in the later stages of shock, did he check his own wound that still pulsed black fluid into the murky water.

Painful, he decided, but nothing to worry about to a great extent.

'Calm down,' he heard Castor try, 'just focus on breathing, girl.'

Seeing an opening, as Ellie's eyes turned on his fellow hunter, Caius' hands darted out, grabbing Ellie's left, unbroken hand, and placed it firmly to her back, before she could pull another weapon.

He should have known she'd fight harder to keep someone she loved alive.

With a scream of effort, Ellie dragged the floating switchblade out of the water and, with a broken wrist protesting her acts, promptly stabbed the blade hard into the Master of Shadow's shoulder. The well honed edge tore into gap of carapace between the shoulder pauldron and the breastplate, and, with the damn thing threatening to sever his arm, Caius pulled back, leaving Ellie to pull herself from the flood water, snatching up her loaded pistol as she did so.

'Fucking hell,' Caius whispered, even as Castor drew his own weapon on the persistent girl, 'we're trying to bloody help you here.'

'Screw you, motherfucker,' Ellie hit back, keeping the pistol level on his Castor's head as she backed away, placing herself between Joel's still form, and the raised hellfire, 'now you help him right fucking now, or I'm putting a bullet in between your eyes.'

'This is going no where, Ellie,' Castor answered, 'You can't take all of us.'

'You know what?' The girl sighed, 'you're absolutely right. But you need me alive.'

With that, she removed the pistol's sights from the Hunter's head, only to place it squarely to her own head.

'Ok, Ellie,' Caius interjected immediately, raising his uninjured hand in a sign of peace, 'let's just calm down...'

'Fuck that; you were going to kill him. I heard what you two were talking about.'

Though he might have cursed himself for thinking such at a time like this, Caius couldn't help but be impressed by such an astute ear on the ground for one's surroundings. If her birth world hadn't been Earth, she'd already be a viable choice for the Guard's many recruits. Tested under fire, and willing to go to any length to protect those she held most dear.

Although, right now, that last admirable trait was working against them.

'Now you heal him,' Ellie put simply, 'and I'll put the gun down, everything's happy. But you come one step closer,' she warned, as Castor advanced another pace, 'and I'll blow my fucking head off. Good luck finding anything with that... Stay the hell back, Aurelius!'

Her last comment was directed at the Battlemaster, who'd only just entered the caved in basement from Leandros' sanitorium in the next door room.

'I leave you two alone for less than a minute,' she heard the shadow mutter, 'And what the hell happens?'

'No excuse, sir,' Caius replied without a trace of humor, before he turned about to face the Battlemaster, trusting Castor to keep the pistol pointed at them unfired, 'so what happens now?'

After a few moments, Aurelius shook his head in resignation.

'Do we have a choice? Give it to him.'

Caius opened and closed his mouth several times, before he decided to abandon any further debate. Every moment they remained here, he decided, was another precious second lost from now, until the Sentient took over.

Moving with his weapons dropped into the fluid about his feet, Caius moved to Joel's side, before he unlocked the med kit, and nearly tore it apart in frustration.

There were a number of syringes in metallic casings there; four to be exact, each one filled with a black fluid. The three off to the right, he knew, were purgance vials; nanobots that targeted pathogens throughout the body with great ease: essentially antiseptics for use in the field, which would have little use for bled man.

The last one, on the left, was the concoction of long lasting adrenaline and blood substitute that begged to be used.

He hefted a vial from each side, and sighed in the frustration at the power of choice once more. Even if he'd engaged comms for Aurelius' advice, there was still a good chance of those accused sharp ears picking up the sound, as he'd just gathered from the recent events.

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, he made the right choice.

The sharp pin pierced skin, and the black liquid within was released to begin it's work.

'Comms check; Vorenus calling in. Spectre perimeter 0 through 30 is clear.'

'Copy that, Guardsman,' Forus' voice cracked over the comms, 'continue on to perimeter point 45, and report back.'

Not for the first time since landing on Earth, Vorenus cursed his luck on drawing the short straw on the lots for perimeter patrol. Right now, he was bored out out of his mind, pacing Spectre's boundaries with it's neighbouring forest, without any targets whatsoever.

No, the only ones that had gotten any contacts since landfall were on the Southern quadrants, whilst on the Northern side, where outbound vanguard teams were at work the most, contacts were once in a blue moon.

_One more week_, the Guardsman reminded himself, _One more bloody week before rotation_.

He checked his rear with a casual glance, noted Torus' continued presence at his back, and moved on, sweeping his gaze to and fro, looking for something, anything, to engage and liven his deployment.

Perhaps it was his lust for any combat that drew his eyes to the slight movement off in the bushes, and he jerked to a halt, holding up an open hand to signal a potential threat.

'Forus,' he whispered softly, 'be advised, possible contact. Moving to...'

Vorenus hadn't even finished speaking when the blind man leapt at him from the bushes, screaming through twisted vocal cords more akin to a bat's rather than a human being.

It got maybe a meter to the Guardsman before hellfire dropped it to the wet ground. Another two suppressed hisses snapped off the rifle at his side, as Torus moved up to confirm the kill.

'Perimeter 06?' Forus' voice called over the comms, 'you still breathing?'

Vorenus had been about to reply when he saw more movement out in the woods.

Except, this time, the entire forest seemed to move.

Then all hell broke loose.

'Enemy contacts!' he bellowed, thumbing the rifle to full auto, 'Torus, get clear! Twenty plus, no, thirty? Ah, screw it Forus, there's a lot of them. Breaking contact now!'

Backing up several paces, he unleashed the remainder of his current clip into the horde, even as he cursed himself for tempting the Great Father.

When he'd asked the god for action, he hadn't meant facing an innumerable horde with only a single squadmate.

Let alone a tide that seemed to be closing in on the Guard Firebase from every possible direction, as silenced hellfire cracked across the entirety of the perimeter, and the screams of the dying infected gave way to their vengeful comrades.

He replaced the spent magazine.

They could be here for quite some time.

'Look,' Caius managed in a relatively upbeat tone, 'I appreciate you were trying to save your old man, but next time, can you shoot me with a suppressed weapon at least?'

His final statement was punctuated all too clearly by the animalistic howls of the damned humans above. Evidently, in the midst of the scuffle, the all too obvious detail they'd all skipped was the need to remain silent from the ever vigil Infected above them.

Sure enough, the loud crash of decaying wood subcumbing to some kind of brunt force sounded close by, and the clicking began once more. Suddenly though, as quickly as it had started, the croaks and cries of the clicker ceased.

'Bastard's down,' the recently released Blademaster sounded off over the comms, 'but there's a lot more out here.'

'Can't move yet, Battlemaster,' Korventhor added remarkably, breaking his constant demand for battles that he couldn't possibly win, but still did. 'Unless you can find a way to get these crap heads to go fetch a grenade.'

'Afraid we can't afford the munitions, there,' Aurelius replied as he paced the basement back and forth, sending gentle ripples in the knee deep water with every stride, 'we'll hang tight max ten minutes. If not, then we'll find a way out, Infected or no Infected.'

'You sure you can walk?' Caius piped up once more in no connection to the conversation, his glance bypassing Ellie's eyes.

'I'll be fine,' a hoarse voice replied, as Joel tentatively stepped off the blood stained table, still vaguely registering the dying pain in his throat. Cloaked from the body's immune system to prevent cases of rejection by the body, the modified blood cells contained within the black liquid were beginning to work, knitting the torn tissue back together beyond the natural rate, whilst the heavy dose of adrenaline served to block out most of the pain.

Most, considering throat wounds were usually accompanied a significant level of pain.

Not quite being able to feel the numbed wound, Joel padded a hand over the linen bandaging that Caius had secured to his neck, and the indentation of the clean tear. As he did so, a new patch of blood began to pool under the cloth, although as he withdrew his hand, Joel couldn't help but note Ellie's visible shock at something he was incapable of viewing.

'Joel,' she whispered, 'your blood; it's black.'

His own eyes nearly widened at that, before a familiar voice cut into their conversation once more.

'That's good,' Caius announced in the cheerful manner Joel hadn't heard around around medical personnel in at least twenty two years, 'that means the serum is in the wound now; should be sealed up in an hour, and, well, you should feel exactly like you did before getting a new hole torn in you.'

'Don't worry about the looks,' Leandros snidely put in once more from upstairs, 'you're probably kinder on the eyes now anyway.'

Not for the first time, Ellie was beginning to wonder if Aurelius' choice to issue the pair with comm beads since the 'unpleasant' matter had been put to rest was actually for the better, if only it weren't for the reply that met the Blademaster.

'And you'd know that all too well, wouldn't you?' Aurelius threw back, before the comms cracked up in subdued laughter, with the obvious exception of Leandros.

'Bloody Makar,' Ellie thought she could make out amongst the sniggers, and she turned to Caius for some elaboration. She didn't dare question why, but the Master of Shadows was relatively subdued over her involvement in his latest injury. She'd already apologized since he'd caved in to her demands, but she'd expected a lot more from someone she'd just shot in the hip.

She certainly hadn't expected the full blown retaliation to come from someone other than Caius, although after Aurelius' alterations to her knowledge of history, she could somewhat see through the Blademaster's barely restrained fury.

It just went against any logic that a gunshot victim would cheerfully explain interior jokes to the shooter, but he did.

'We used to hunt Makar on Lementus before, you know,' Caius clarified, 'Ugly pieces of shit, but by the Great Father, they had claws that could sheer a tank's side with ease.'

'How did they taste?' Ellie asked blindly, trying to get another image of a perfect world before it's apocalypse. She couldn't actually see under the Guardsman's helm, but if she had, she firmly believed the Master of Shadows would be wearing a grin that stretched from ear to ear.

'Like shit,' he replied. 'Turngarts tasted a hell lot better. No, what we hunted Makar for was these.'

At that, he shifted his arms until they were no longer crossed over his chest, and one was comfortably rested on his knee, but still pointed to the ceiling that shook slightly with the infected's movements above. Then, without much warning, the three claw like Talons leapt from his wrist for the eye to view.

'We hunted Makar for their talons to craft weapons,' he continued, 'although, as Leandros found out, they can also use these nasty pieces of work to make a mess of your face.'

'I heard that,' an irate voice chipped in once more, prompting another snigger from several other sources about the comm net.

'Yeah,' Caius finished, still chuckling at the memory of stitching back together a torn face that was still spitting curses at the dead animal even through the pain, 'if you look under that helmet, you'll see some pretty messed up shit.'

Not quite sure if she could join in the general humor, with the ill tempered Blademaster still upstairs, Ellie kept her mouth firmly shut, although she couldn't quite help let a grin break out across her face.

'Bloody hell,' Leandros whispered, 'this is going to take forever; these pricks aren't going anywhere without some provocation.'

Looking up from the half cleaned weapon in his hands, Aurelius had to admit that his Blademaster, no matter how rash, knew when action was needed. They currently had a snowball's chance in hell of getting the two humans out of here unspotted, and it was only a matter of time before another fugal ridden madman barged through the door. They needed an exit, and fast. Ellie's remaining time was slipping away with every passing moment.

For a moment, he considered just having the men toss a grenade out across the street, but he quickly dismissed the idea. An explosion, while it would undoubtedly have an immediate effect, it would be an incredibly short lived one, and one could barely smuggle a pair of humans across the moonlit ground in a few seconds.

No, they needed something that would draw everything in the vicinity, and then keep them anchored there.

As if he too possessed the Storm's curse, Korventhor suddenly pointed toward one of the giant structures of the city; one that nearly kissed the heavens and stars above the night's sky.

'How about if we brought that down?'

'You've got to be shitting me,' Ellie whispered in reply to the absurd plan, 'you're going to drop a skyscraper on our heads as a distraction? We'll be flattened...'

'Correction,' Aurelius interrupted, 'we'll be dropping it on the heads of the infected; not our heads. Besides, Korventhor's fairly confident that there'll be a sewer system beneath the structure; they'll exfil via the tunnels before they drop the building.'

'In which case,' Ellie finished, 'we get flattened.'

'That's the reason we sent Titus and Octavius in,' Caius explained patiently, 'those two start shooting up the place, bringing the horde in, and giving us time to move. Then they drop the structure to make their own escape.'

'And don't forget the Blademaster,' Castor added, although Caius just chuckled in reply.

'Well he isn't shooting anything, right?'

As if on que, the silence of the night was shattered in a heartbeat, as the rapid thunderclaps of unsuppressed hellfire tore apart the fragile peace that had settled with the company's short break.

'Right on time,' Aurelius noted, eyeing the timekeeper, before he turned to face the depleted squad at his side. 'Let's get mobile.'

'Come on!' Leandros roared down the chittering stairwell, even as more bodies scrambled up to meet him, 'Come on you sick bastards!'

He lashed out with a solid boot, crushing ribs under the brutal roundhouse, and sending the ill-fated runner out the window that lined the structure's side. Even as it's shrill cry began to resound off the building's sides, another pair had joined it's lone call for beleaguered aid, as serrated blades hacked into flesh.

Ripping the gore stricken knife from the clicker's shoulder, Leandros hammered at it again, until a blade punched through it's windmilling arms, and tore through it's mutilated head.

With another roar of fury, he sent the half decapitated corpse down the stairs with the shove of his foot, into it's countless compatriots below.

It didn't matter to Leandros; all that mattered was keeping his foe in the reach of his blades. Talon met corrupt flesh once more, as the Blademaster of the 23rd continued to live up to his namesake.

'Reloading!' Octavius called, as the rifle clicked hollowly in his hands, signalling another change in clips. At the moment his words echoed beyond the helmet, Titus stepped forward into the corridor, a fed hellfire rifle in hand.

Another series of thunderclaps tore apart the silence of the night, as hellfire tore into the nightmares spawned of the fungal menace, and another emptied clip hit the ground.

'Clip cleared,' The Guardsman called out, keeping his rifle trained on the advancing horde that tumbled over the corpses of their fallen. After a hellish rush of flesh, the pair had been forced back from the stairwell they'd been guarding, and since, they'd been stemming the tide with a rapidly exhausting supply of hellfire rounds.

'Empty,' his compatriot replied, ejecting another spent clip, 'reloading.'

As Titus spun back into cover instinctively, as a result of honed habit to prevent taking on too many holes in firefights, Octavius himself swept out into the horde's path in his brother's place, although, he noted with some dismay that the tide of howling corpses had progressed at least two more meters on their position since he'd last observed their unnerving advance. Forgetting standard procedures, he thumbed the burst limiter on his weapon's side off, and proceeded to shred the hallway in a orchestra of fury and death, as the hellfire rifle spat it's payload into hearts and heads on full auto.

The weapon clicked empty. Again.

'Covering!' Titus cried, unleashing his own barrage of firepower, whilst Octavius' hand went for another clip. Though fate graced him with another hard clip reaching his fingers, the area behind the selected magazine was empty space.

'Shit,' he whispered, before he announced his situation to his ally, 'last mag.'

He could tell Octavius had begun to speak in reply, if he hadn't been drowned out the screach of ruined metal being torn against it's own restraints, all in accompanyment of the horrendous roar of a bloater.

Turning about, the Guardsman came face to face with another of the armored tanks; the remains of one of the service doors the pair had blockaded earlier hefted in both of the monster's hands high over it's own head, as if it intended to bring it down on the Guardsmen with crushing force.

Octavius was faster.

Keeping the rifle on automatic fire, the veteran let ten of the twenty hellfire rounds in his last clip fly into the beast's open mouth, until it's armored skull hung precariously off it's neck, nearly decapitated by the sheer stopping power of the oversized projectiles.

'Pull back, Titus,' Octavius roared over his brother's hailstorm of fire, 'our flank is exposed.'

'Didn't I tell you this was a bad idea?'

Octavius bit off the barbed reply he had in mind, since Titus' admittedly downcast prophecies were once again spot on; they were landed in the deep shit once more.

'Well next time, learn to shut your damn mouth,' he couldn't help, firing off another hellfire into a runner that clumsily stumbled out from the Bloater's recently foraged path, 'and maybe you'll stop tempting the Great Father. Now bloody move; cover the six, I'll get the front.'

Like a well drilled machine, the pair of Shadows cut through the new, smaller swarm of bodies in moments; the last ten rounds in Octavius' clip proving more than enough to put down the thrashing shock troopers of the Cordyceps parasite. Having fought past the new threat, and with only a pair of rounds left, Octavius rounded about to loose off his last ordnance into the horde.

He didn't need to see his targets fall to know he'd hit them; there were so many of them that to miss would have been an act of sacrilege against the Fallen.

The third time he pulled the trigger, the metallic nag of a trigger pulled without a round to fire.

'Damnit,' Octavius cursed. Throwing the spent rifle to his back and hearing the restraints lock in with one hand, he drew his last firearm; the hellfire pistol at his thigh, onto the foe.

He emptied the entirety of the clip in a few brief seconds, before he was forced once more to lose another metal clip from his burden, even as he and Titus backpedaled toward their final strongpoint.

By the time they reached the open elevator, both of the pair were reduced to sidearms; their blades and talons already bloodied from those who'd managed to make it through the dwindling firestorm. As he rounded the corner though, Titus came face to face with a gore stricken shadow; in the midst of perhaps a half dozen howling monsters.

A moment later, and the fungal ridden beasts had hit the cold floor, torn asunder under the Blademaster's fury.

Evidently, their use of unsuppressed rounds had succeeded in distracting the horde, perhaps too well.

'Korventhor,' Octavius shouted over the bloodcalls of the damned humans, 'you'd better be ready; we're cutting it awfully close here.'

'You never complained on Braxen,' the uncaring reply sounded, 'Give me a minute.'

'We ain't got a minute!' Titus spat back, as he ejected another spent clip, 'We're almost on scatter rounds!'

At the words leaving his brother's mouth, Octavius' own pistol clicked empty a last time, and, out of options, he fished one of the three unique magazines from his left side. Designed load into a pistol, but to detonate only a fraction of a second from leaving the barrel, scatter rounds were a Guardsman's true last initiative in a close quarter battle.

Despite the immense power behind each shot, the fact that each clip only possessed five rounds did little to comfort the Guardsman, as he took aim on the lead runner.

Half a meter away from his outstretched hand, Octavius pulled the trigger.

The man's head detonated in a spectacular and gruesome display of gore, even as his decapitated corpse slid to the ground, unable to power itself any further toward it's prey.

'We're leaving right now!' He heard Leandros shout, 'Octavius, Titus! Down the shaft!'

No more than a second behind one another, each of the three Shadows transformed into a blur of motion, as they fought clear of the tide, and bolted for the tantalizingly close darkness of the lift shaft. Entering last, Octavius turned about for one more shot into the ocean of corruption before he dived out into the open space.

Gripping to the heavy set cables that lined the vertical tunnel's interior, the trio swept down like birds of prey, in flight of an unholy swarm of their old hunts.

They hit the ground hard, bursting through the grounded lift's roofing with the shriek of rusting metal being forced against it's stubborn form, before they were off, pedaling into the dark, even as a pair of bodies followed them down the darkened path, although, lacking any sense and armor, they tore into the ground without any means of slowing down, and remained there, still.

'You'd better be fucking ready!' Leandros burst out between his intakes of breath as he sped up to the Master of Ordnance's side. He was only met with a quiet grin.

'Oh, I'm always ready to collapse shit,' Korventhor replied, and Leandros saw the friend he'd stabbed in his blinded fury. A non-critical injury, but still, he had allowed vengeance to take priority over the living.

'Brother,' he began, before a hand stopped him.

'Save the sappy shit for later, Blademaster,' Korventhor told him, 'for now, let's get the hell out of here. Together.'

'Together,' Leandros echoed. Then, without another word uttered, the pair disappeared into the tunnels at the belly of the dead city, before the explosive lightshow above began.

'Clear to move, Aurelius,' Caius called over the comms, watching in satisfaction as the last chittering corpse dropped to the ground, with most of it's twisted head gone, even as it sank into the muck at it's feet. His cowl drawn up over his helmet, Caius watched on as his Battlemaster advanced out into the flooded street, overgrown with all kinds of foliage; the result of nearly two dozen years of neglect.

After having made some good headway, with the explosive distraction undertaken by the better part of the remaining vanguard, the weakened company had once again run into heavy Infected presences. And though the rooftops offered fine lines of sight, they were certainly in a far greater state of disrepair, compared to some of the past structures the Master of Shadows had set his eyes upon since they'd dropped into this nightmarish cityscape.

They were certainly not to the point of stability he'd recommended for the rather heavy footed humans, which was mainly the reason he found himself, along with Castor, treading the crumbling structures' rooftops providing overwatch for his Battlemaster below.

Keeping his breath low and constant, Caius pulled his vision out of the constrictive scope, and began scanning across the environment, seeking any other potential danger he'd missed. A moaning runner that was in the process of clawing at it's unwanted growths soon joined the cold corpses on the ground.

'Care to give me some warning, next time?'

Caius just grinned at the sarcastic reply to his last round, since the decapitated body had slammed awkwardly against a nearby desk, sending a cautious Battlemaster swinging about, eyes darting about for a target that had already been claimed.

'Next time.'

There was a slight grumble on the other end of the comms, before the line cut into static once more, as Aurelius made his way forward, trail-blazing a muted pathway through the dampened foliage, before he signaled the humans to follow up once. All in all, things were going to plan, and Caius had begun to refold his kit when a shadow caught his eye.

It had only been there for a split second, but, like always, it was the movement that alerted him to the previously unseen enemy. Forcing himself to tune out the background of the dead city, Caius honed in on the structure he'd just noted down, trying to identify what they were facing.

Nothing sounded in the wind.

No moan or odd croak of a runner nor stalker, and none of the ominous clicking that marked a clicker, or the heavily armored form that had claimed Decius.

'Aurelius,' he breathed quietly, deploying the Judgement as he uttered the words, 'possible contact; second floor; structure on your...'

He hadn't even finished the warning when the Sentient burst through the glass window, and threw itself down at the exposed Battlemaster below.

Perhaps it was only the grace of the Great Father that alerted him, or maybe it was the gut instinct built up over millennia of facing threats, but the Battlemaster was not caught unawares by the sudden assault.

Letting the Talons leap from his hands, Aurelius swung an open fist up at the descending monstrosity, intent on putting some space between them.

It was only then that he realized it had the crude logic to arm itself.

He felt the jarring impact travel up his lengthened arm, telling him he'd found his mark, although the fact that the Sentient had not instinctively released it's grip on the heavyset crowbar did little to comfort him.

'Enemy contacts!' Caius screamed over the comms, before the tranquil street lit up with the screams of the Infected, and Aurelius couldn't help but curse the Sentient, and whichever bitch had spawned the human that had become his enemy, even as hellfire strafed the road, cutting down the maddened men and women before they could come within an arm's reach of him.

But as he raised his free hand to strike the Sentient, whose torso and flesh remained locked around the claws of his other gauntlet, a lucky runner that had survived the shower of death delivered from the air leapt for him, teeth barred.

Aurelius gave him a moment's thought, the well placed elbow strike he'd thrown into the runner's head shattered teeth and the skull behind them, and the monster crumpled into the cool, stagnant water, twitching uncontrollably as it's crippled brain continued to desperately drive it's ruined body on to one final meal.

However, having removed his eyes from his restrained foe, he never saw the Sentient haul the crowbar above it's head, eyes blazing with fury, and bring it down on his own head until shadows clouded his vision.

Forgetting the Battlemaster's earlier briefing on their ammunition state, Ellie unloaded the pitiful remnants of her current clip into the shrieking clicker's face, until the gun clicked empty, and the thrashing beast had stopped moving.

For good measure, she slammed the heel of her foot against the corpse, putting some distance between the fallen creature and her own being, although if it was because she'd pushed herself back into the muck, or if she'd actually shoved the deadweight corpse away from her, she didn't know.

Quite frankly, in her current predicament, Ellie couldn't have given less of a shit.

Fumbling with the next occupied magazine, she replaced the spent cartridge too slowly, as a second Infected; this time a runner, or stalker, judging from the way the fungus was beginning to claw at the woman's whitening eyes, threw itself at the exposed girl, snapping it's jaws with the prospect of a momentary deliverance from the curse of hunger.

With a curse of effort, Ellie planted a foot against the flailing bitch, keeping her just out of reach, until the slippery cartridge slammed into place, and she was able to place the short barrel of the pistol to the fungal ridden head of her assailant.

Still breathing hard as she managed to drag herself up, her eyes clouded partly by the blood that had splattered across her face when she'd pulled the trigger, Ellie dimly made out a thrashing couple of bodies just a little off to her left.

Wiping away the drying liquid, she registered the Battlemaster lying on the ground, with a screaming man above him, hammering Aurelius' head in with a battered crowbar.

If there was any doubt left, the distorted fungal growths creeping from the Infected's mouth threw it out the window.

Ellie loosed of the entirety of the clip into the madman, until only an empty click of metal replied her twitching trigger finger.

Agast, she could only watch on as the Sentient looked up from the prone body at it's feet, and turned it's bloodshot eyes on her, barely registering the five bullets lodged in it's chest.

Ellie managed to back away perhaps another pace before the Sentient was onto her; the heavy bar sweaping her legs out from underneath her, until she crashed into the water, and the monster raised the metal rod to strike.

Without warning, the creature was suddenly rocked to the side, before it gave ground again under an unrelenting assault.

That was, at least, until the wooden board Joel had taken to the Sentient finally shattered on the fifth blow, leaving him with only his bare fists against the enraged monster.

Ellie forgotten, the man seized Joel by the collar before it tossed him like a heavy sack through the window of the store it had originally leapt down from. Then, it was off, stalking it's fallen prey.

Joel hadn't managed to move a meter, before the Sentient had caught up with him, and it lunged down, until it's teeth sank into flesh once more.

Fear etched across his eyes, the Sentient could only watch on in terror, as it saw what lay between it's teeth.

Not the man's neck, but an armored gauntlet; black with both paint and blood.

With all his might, Leandros tore his trapped hand up, throwing the Sentient off balance, before he brought it back down into the ground; it's teeth still locked firmly into his fist.

'This is for Serena, you piece of shit!'

Then, he unleashed the Talons in his good hand, and proceeded to tear apart the thrashing monster. The claws ripping through flesh and bone, the Blade master brought down his closed fist at least two dozen times, before he finally pried his bleeding hand free from the creature's mouth.

By that time of course, the once mighty example of the infection had been reduced to bleeding head, three detached limbs, and a pile of shredded flesh and biology.

Falling back into a seated position, the Blademaster brought up his bloodied hand, hardly caring for the pitiful remnants of the horde, who seemed to fade away in his peripheral vision, as Korventhor, Titus and Octavius tore into them, scattering the feral beasts to the winds.

'Leandros?'

Aurelius' question caught him unawares, and Leandros turned up to face his battered Battlemaster. His helmet was dented and rent, but the Great Father had enough mercy to leave him capable of standing after his ordeal.

With his brother's continued survival assured, the Blademaster turned back to his own wound; something all too obvious for Aurelius to miss.

'Is that...?'

'Death is fate,' Leandros whispered in reply, lowering the guilty appendage. The battle rage slowly fading from his heart, the full gravity of his recent actions had finally registered in his mind. But he felt nothing; no mourning for his inevitable passing.

Only a calm acceptance of being able to greet Serena once more.

Aurelius though, wasn't sharing the mood.

'You can't throw your life away, Leandros!' he raged, 'you're the Blademaster of the 23rd; you...'

'Only Gods live forever,' the Guardsman replied with an uncharacteristic calm, as he quoted Corinthus, 'the rest of us have to meet fate some day.'

'That day can wait!' Aurelius cried desperately, 'you fought against every bloody thing in your life; now fucking fight for your life. Don't give up now.'

Leandros was silent for a moment, before he shrugged once more.

'It's already done, Aurelius.' He half whispered, 'Now I just damned myself to save a human. I've made my peace. Now there's only one more thing to do.'

Slowly, he pulled a short blade from his thigh.

'I'm not turning on my brothers.'

'On that,' a voice whispered behind him, 'we are agreed.'

Strong, armored hands locked around his knife hand, and pinned him down to the hard ground. Leandros thrashed about, but there were too many.

Too many of his brothers.

'I'm sorry.'

There was a hiss of a blade leaving it's sheath, before Caius brought the sharpened point down on the Blademaster's arm.


End file.
